The latest OptFor-EU report “Development of an Open-Access Code to Harmonize Forest-Climate Data” introduces a powerful data harmonisation framework, ensuring that diverse forest and climate datasets can be integrated, compared, and applied effectively in forest management and climate modeling.
This report presents a standardized approach to collecting and processing critical climate and forest data sets. The harmonization plan ensures compatibility and comparability across different sources to be used together for a range of tasks, such as for the estimation of Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators (EFMI), input data for forestry and land surface models or direct input into the Decision Support System (DSS).
The OptFor-EU harmonization code is structured into three main streams:
- Historic Data – Accumulating past climate records to study long-term forest-climate relations.
- Satellite Data – Using Earth observation technologies to monitor ecosystem changes.
- Projection Data – Putting future climate projections into line for assessing the probable impacts on forest management.
The open-source computer program, published via Zenodo and GitHub, offers open-source tools to enable climate modeling, Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators (EFMIs), and Decision Support System (DSS) development in an open way.
By facilitating data consistency across models and case studies, this report enables scientists, policymakers and forest authorities to easily employ and make use of homogenised, high-quality data in decision-making to optimize the resilience and decarbonization potential of European forests.
