Sergey Zudin

Conducting sustainability impact assessments of forestry-wood chains: examples of ToSIA applications

Within the EFORWOOD project, new methodological approaches to assess the sustainability impacts of forestry-wood chains (FWC) were developed by using indicators of environmental, social and economic relevance. This paper introduces and discusses the developed approach and the two main products developed in the EFORWOOD project: the Database Client and the Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment (ToSIA), which hold, calculate and integrate the extensive information and data collected. Sustainability impact assessment (SIA) of FWCs is based on measuring and analysing environmental, economic and social indicators for all of the production processes along the value chain. The adoption of the method varies between applications and depends on the specification of the FWC in the assessment and what questions are studied. ToSIA is very flexible and can apply forest-, product-, industry- and consumer-defined perspectives. Each perspective influences the focus of the analysis and affects system boundaries. ToSIA can assess forest value chains in different geographical regions covering local, regional, national and up to the continental scale. Potential issues and scenarios can be analysed with the tool including, for example, the impacts of different forest policies on the sustainability of an FWC. This paper presents how ToSIA can be applied to solve such diverse problems and underlines this with examples from different case studies. Differences in chain set-up, system boundaries and data requirements are highlighted and experiences with the implementation of the sustainability impact assessment methods are discussed. The EFORWOOD case studies offer valuable reference data for future sustainability assessments.

Indicators for assessing the environmental impacts of land use change across Europe

Much progress has been made in understanding future trend development over the last years. Governments and international bodies are increasingly attempting to assess ex-ante the impact of their policy proposals. In the SENSOR project, environmental sustainability is assessed by answering a set of policy relevant questions likely to affect goods and services provided by land. The answer is complex and the assessment of future options is very sensitive to scale, how far ahead in time is being considered, and whether the assessment addresses local, regional or global concerns. The relationships between components of land use and the response of environmental indicators are not necessarily linear and assessing impacts at a European scale implies to use multi-scale sources of data of uneven quality across countries, which in turn creates constraints when interpreting the results at different spatial levels.

Assessing Lignocellulosic Biomass Potentials From Forests and Industry

Lignocellulosic biomass from forests and forest industries represents a crucial resource for the bioeconomy. Many assessments have been carried out over the last decade to quantify biomass potentials from forests and forest industries. The results from these assessments are quite diverse because of varying definitions and assumptions. Here we report on a recent comprehensive assessment carried out in the frame of the S2Biom project for 37 countries in Europe. We present the methodology to estimate biomass from forests and the forest industries, with a specific effort to estimate forest biomass supply costs. A set of biomass potentials is presented, that offers flexibility to users to select biomass potentials according to specific requirements, information demands, and policy contexts. Results are presented at the regional level for different types of potentials and with associated costs to allow better insight into the composition of the potential. The associated S2Biom toolset and database allows users to select results based on own preferences and needs, thereby offering the most comprehensive assessment of forest biomass potentials currently available in Europe.

Improving Access to Big Data in Agriculture and Forestry Using Semantic Technologies

To better understand and manage the interactions of agriculture and natural resources, for example under current increasing societal demands and climate changes, agro-environmental research must bring together an ever growing amount of data and information from multiple science domains. Data that is inherently large, multi-dimensional and heterogeneous, and requires computational intensive processing. Thus, agro-environmental researchers must deal with specific Big Data challenges in efficiently acquiring the data fit to their job while limiting the amount of computational, network and storage resources needed to practical levels. Automated procedures for collection, selection, annotation and indexing of data and metadata are indispensable in order to be able to effectively exploit the global network of available scientific information. This paper describes work performed in the EU FP7 Trees4Future and SemaGrow projects that contributes to development and evaluation of an infrastructure that allows efficient discovery and unified querying of agricultural and forestry resources using Linked Data and semantic technologies.

Requirements for data management and maintenance to support regional land use research

SENSOR is dependent on sufficient reliable and accurate data that have to be provided and shared by the partners within the project. Access to reliable and harmonised data across Europe is a fundamental precondition for realisation of the SENSOR project. The current chapter describes basics concerning geo-spatial data types and formats, system architecture and database technologies, interoperability standards, including the INSPIRE principles, data warehouse and GeoPortal technologies. Further some information on spatial data mining, on data policies and related legal aspects and the SENSOR approach for spatial data handling are provided.