BREATHE: Technica Meeting 2 in Ankara

Another successful BREATHE meeting in Ankara! The Technical Meeting 2 took place hybrid, online and in-person in Ankara, at Turkish partner GlobeTech’s premises on Hacettepe University campus on the 25th of April 2023. One of the main scopes of this meeting was achieved with the integration of satellite, in-situ and ancillary data into Globetech IT cloud platform.

The first tangible results of forest disturbance mapping over two uses cases in Austria and Türkiye, including fire delineation in the Istanbul District are now available and promising. The forest disturbance and fire delineation mapping are currently being refined before deployment at country-wide level and will be validated using a rigorous QA/QC procedure based on a stratified sampling design. The work now focuses on the consolidation of method developments over the 2 uses cases for fire severity based on a differentiated Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), Above-Ground-Biomass (AGB) and AGB change mapping, estimation of carbon dioxide emissions by sources and removals by sinks from biomass changes and emissions from biomass burning, as well as greenhouse (GHG) flux estimates using the FLEXPART transport model developed by the University of Vienna. In addition, relevant data is being gathered on a 2nd study case in the Mediterranean ecoregion of a selected large wildfire for atmospheric modelling. All relevant outcomes will be displayed on a UI monitoring dashboard according to the requirements of the main Turkish stakeholder, the General Directorate of Forestry (OGM) compiler of the greenhouse gas national inventory report for Türkiye, gathered by its Austrian counterpart the Environment Agency Austria (Umweltbundesamt UBA), both very involved since the start of the project.

GeoVille is thrilled to welcome in return its Turkish partner Globetech along with UBA, Sistema and University of Vienna for the next Technical Meeting 3 that will be held in-person at GeoVille’s premises in Innsbruck on the 21st of June, strengthening and ensuring an important requirement of this EUREKA/FFG research project to favor international (and also national) team collaboration.