The last techinical meeting was useful to close final results, review deadlines and prepare the closure of te project.
We discussed on common definition, standardization of types of forest roads, specially on:
- Development of the database structure for descriptive information necessary to monitor forest roads
- Showcase that the standardization of forest roads as well as the structure/entries of the database is working in partner countries
- The developed ICT tools prove that real-time navigation and road monitoring/data acquisition is cost effective and enriches the process with a myriad of information useful at various stages of problem solving (eg. Road mapping, speed archiving, condition of the trespassing etc).
Se agreed some Key aspects to be further capitalized:
1. Disseminate the standardization output and the related database structure to other interested countries/stakeholders
2. New technologies for data acquisition (Lidar, UAVs, Mobile Mapping Systems, new generation satellites, etc) are available and can contribute to one degree or another to cost effectiveness and time efficiency
FORCIP+ ECHO/SUB/2015/718661/PREP20 11 -12/02/2016
3. Integration of forest road data to National Spatial Information Systems (NSDIs) presents a major issue in many countries and involves problems like: format interoperability, compliance to INSPIRE Directive, geometric features conversion, descriptive information compliance etc. It is anticipated that the compliance of the developed database structure to standardized national geo-databases should be further pursued and capitalized upon
4. The estimation/prediction of the speed rate (ether average of maximum) of firefighting vehicles has been another major issue for very practical reasons. It is anticipated that a solid methodology should be developed for estimating this speed limit, which presumably will lead to the development of standardized tables/nomographs to be used in various countries, This should be based to the parameters/entries collected in our database (ie. condition of pavement, road type, slope, vegetation along the sides of the road, bottlenecks, etc). Primary tests/studies contacted show promising results.
5. Another major issue is the update of the forest road monitoring data. This update should be done on a regular basis (eg. Yearly), but this is prohibited by the high cost of data acquisition. Hence, it is anticipated that a methodology and practice should be developed for a rapid and cost effective tackling of this problem. The general idea of such a development is to combine the collected information (ie. slope, road type, vegetation, etc) with additional information (ie. soil type, historical records, country-specific parameters, etc.) in order to develop a “smart tool” for forecasting and predicting the road segments most likely to suffer from changes (ie. erosions, etc) and drive the updating process in these segments per priority. Such a general model can be further “calibrated” by country.
We celebrated a field trip in the Karst region of Slovenian, visiting a forest fires provincial command center unit, chainsaw training demostration and forest management examples.
The final confence was defined, to be celebrated, with an open seminar, in Valladolid, Spain, in June 7th-9th.
