A participatory WSL initiative advances forest monitoring

FF: Marco Ferretti, why did you launch the Advanced Inventorying and Monitoring for Swiss Forests (SwissAIM) initiative?

MF: The information needs related to forests have changed and expanded. In Switzerland, we can build on the strong basis offered by the Swiss National Forest Inventory and other national monitoring programs. However, climate change caused repeated and more frequent extreme events like droughts, which changed our information needs about forests. We need to monitor our forests more frequently, more comprehensively, and possibly more cost-effectively than before. For example, many intensive and valuable forests measurements are located outside a statistically representative sampling framework, which limits the possibility to extrapolate their results. If the same measurements are located on the same set of representative sites and complemented with sensors and proximal and remote sensing techniques, forest monitoring will gain an enormous added value. This is the idea behind SwissAIM: Building on existing monitoring infrastructure to stay a step ahead.

FF: For whom is the initiative important?

MF: Forests provide many services to society and are a key asset to mitigate climate change, so the initiative is important for all of us. For scientists, the initiative is important because, by bringing diversified measurements and expertise together on the same representative set of sites, it will create synergies. Different groups of scientists will benefit from each other. Stakeholders on the political level and forest managers will count on more frequent information on forest dynamics to plan and verify the results of their decisions. The society at large will gain advanced information for better combating and adapting to climate change.