FR have established how to detect young trees from space using synthetic aperture RADAR and machine learning techniques. This will support the monitoring of the planting of tens of thousands of restock sites and new woodland across Britain. In searching for a solution researchers hypothesised that even if the trees are too small to see, maybe we could ‘feel’ them using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). A different technique to utilising optical data, SAR provides ‘fuzzy’ data on the presence of objects, their size, orientation and texture. The research found that this was possible and data on whether sites had tree cover or not has been derived for extensive areas of Britain and NFI are working to operationalise the process.
Forest Research, working with Forestry and Land Scotland, is leading a forest restoration Demo for the EU Horizon2020 “SUPERB” project. This demonstrates conversion to continuous cover forestry, establishment of high-elevation forests, and riparian woodlands with natural flood management measures, and will work with stakeholders to examine potential for upscaling.
We use 3 types of cookie. You can choose which cookies you're happy for us to use.
Strictly necessary cookies
Always On
These essential cookies do things like remember your progress through a form.
They always need to be on.
Cookies that measure website use
We use Google Analytics to measure how you use the website so we can improve it based on user needs.
Google Analytics sets cookies that store anonymised information about:
how you got to the site
the pages you visit on forestresearch.gov.uk and how long you spend on each page
what you click on while you're visiting the site
Cookies that help with our communications and marketing
Some forestresearch.gov.uk pages may contain content from other sites, like YouTube or Flickr, which may set their own cookies. These sites are sometimes called ‘third party’ services. This tells us how many people are seeing the content and whether it’s useful.
