BREATHE Technical Kick-off Meeting and 1st User Meeting in Ankara, Turkey

Successful and promising start of the BREATHE project, “Earth observation Based Enhancement and Verification of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories for Forest and Biomass, with the Technical Kick-off Meeting and 1st User Meeting, which took place end of January in Ankara, Turkey, on the campus of the renowned Hacettepe Ankara Technical University, a world-class research University, where Turkish partner GlobeTech has established its headquarters.

A small group of 5 Austrian partners made the trip to Ankara, including 3 representative staff members from GeoVille, leader of the BREATHE Consortium: Nathalie Morin BREATHE project manager, Norman Kiesslich, LULUCF advisor, and Dominic Hewitt, technical expert on biomass and forest disturbance mapping, Erwin Moldaschl from Umweltbundesamt Austrian Environment Agency (UBA), in charge of the GHG National Inventory Report (NIR), and Stefano Natali, CEO of industrial partner Sistema, expert on Above Ground Biomass mapping from Spaceborne satellites.

Our Turkish host, GlobeTech, a private company in GIS-based decision support solutions for Turkey's leading institutions, were Yesim Kinikoglu, another female BREATHE project manager on the Turkish side - supporting UN Sustainable Goal 5 on Gender Equity -, Kagan Cintimur, CEO and cofounder of GlobeTech with software developers Volkan Caliskan – also BREATHE technical project manager - and Tolga Kaya, plus 3 additional new women staff members, all dedicated towards the achievement of the IT component and the forest wildfire case studies over Istanbul district and in the Southern Mediterranean ecoregion.

3 representatives from the Turkish Directorate of Forestry (OGM), compiler of the GHG NIR for LULUCF also attended this 1st User Meeting. OGM joined forces together with its Austrian counterpart UBA in a very efficient manner, with the aim to identify the main gaps and challenges in the current Turkish GHG NIR that the BREATHE project shall address.

The technical meeting was strengthened by the additional online participation of experts from GeoVille, TurkStat, as well as Pr. Yusuf Serengil, LULUCF scientific expert from Istanbul University and Pr. Andreas Stohl, from University of Vienna, international expert and developer of the FLEXPART Lagrangian particle dispersion models for inverse modeling and transport modelling of GHG emissions.

All formed the ingredients of a detonative cocktail in support to the EO-based method developments for quantifying CO2 emissions and removals from biomass changes, which stands out as one of the current major uncertainties in GHG monitoring.

Visit the BREATHE website at www.breathe-project.eu for more information.