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ISPRS Journal of

PHOTOGRAMMETRY °REMOTE SENSING Official Publication of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS)

Short Communicat ion

Operational Remote Sens ing for Forest Damages

For the past decade, politicians have agreed to spend considerable funds for remote sensing. However, they expect results for solving predicaments of the community of people. Thus, professionals have the obligation to develop op- erational applications of remote sensing. The following is an at tempt towards this aim.

Forest damages and decline due to pollutional effects account, meanwhile, to more than 50% of the forests in the FR Germany. Preventing these damages is considered to be an urgent national task. Remote sensing is a tool to assess both the quantity and the local distribution of damaged forests. Further, it can be considered as a basis to develop methods for precluding progressive forest damages.

Stopping forest damages has high priority. Therefore, the most efficient methods should be applied. For meeting this demand, the Ministry of Research and Technology in the FR Germany sponsored a multidisciplinary project with co-operation from academia and commercial institutions. The objective was to develop and test operational approaches of modern technology including dig- ital multispectral remote sensing from spaceborne and airborne platforms. In- herent detail problems were to be solved for the inventory, mapping and mon- itoring of new types of forest damages and decline.

The German Aerospace Research Establishment (DLR) in Oberpfaffen- hofen managed the project, and participants originated from the field of for- estry and such different branches as photogrammetry, cartography, meteor- ology, physics, electronics, as well as aircraft and spacecraft engineering.

Modern image and data enhancement, digital image processing, and geo- graphic information systems have been an input to the project. Infrared colour photography, airborne multispectral scanning data, SPOT and LANDSAT TM data were used, and in situ spectroradiometer measurements were applied for some fundamental studies of the spectral behaviour of forest stands. Investigations were carried out in ten test areas which are spread all over FR Germany and

0924-2716/90/$03.50 © 1990 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.

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cover the main tree species of Central Europe. Photo and data acquisition was done several times for each test site in various seasons and scales.

Outcomes of the project have been published by DLR, 8031 Oberpf'affenho- fen-FR Germany entitled "Untersuchungen and Kartierung yon Waldsch~iden mit Methoden der Fernerkundung (Abschlut~dokumentation 08.12.1989)".

These results constitute a considerable step towards operational applica- tions of remote sensing for forest damages under prevailingconditions in Cen- tral Europe. An example is the publication ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (1990, 45: 33-45) on "Forest Mapping :Using Satellite Imagery. The Regensburg Map Sheet 1 : 200 000 as example" by M. Keil et al.

G. Hildebrandt, Freiburg-FRG (formerly President ISPRS Commission VII)