On March 7th, a meeting was organized in Saint Claude (Franche-Comté, France) to present first achievements of the Newfor project in this test site :
- lidar data funded by the project and acquired in Sept. 2012.
- field data collected during Oct. 2012.
- methodology and first results of forest resource maps obtained with lidar prediction models.
- methodology and data required to implement the mapping of forest accessibility.
10 persons from the French National Forest Service, and 2 persons from the Haut-Jura regional park attended the meeting. Local forest managers appreciated the possibility to zoom on particular cases, e.g. compartments with particular stakes regarding volume estimation or harvesting possibilities. Besides, people involved in long term forest planning or geomatics were interested in computing compartement-level forest parameters in order to compare forests statistics with their usual data. Several aspects for a better integration of LiDAR data in current management practices were discussed.
It has been proposed to organize a meeting with representatives of the private forest owners and other stakeholders in order to discuss the possibilities to take full advantage on this new data .