On 13.05.2025 SFI-Project organized a round table for leading staff of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” (SE FoU) with the objectives to demonstrate the potentials of RS-Inventory and listen to comments respectively proposals on how further to improve RS-Inventories, considering requirements of SE FoU.
It his opening, Volker Sasse, SFI-Project Leader, informed briefly about the RS-Inventory implementation process and thank the key activists from National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, German Bundeswaldinventur and the Centre of National Forest Inventory of Ukraine. He drew attention to the advantages of the RS-Inventory, namely the coverage of all Ukrainian territories, the option to monitor changes of forest resources closely with relatively low costs. He also demonstrated the potentials with regard to a planned long-term timber supply and forest resource modelling. With this in mind the SFI-Project is currently working on a comprehensive structuring of RS-Inventory results for SE FoU, e.g. by protection levels, accessibility of forests. RS-Inventory revealed a lot of forests outside the jurisdiction of SE FoU, – mainly self-seeded areas – where forest policy measures are required to treat these forests in a sustainable manner. Further, important seems to verify – possibly with the help of the SE FoU – the GIS layer of forest area under state forest management by SE FoU.
Viktor Myroniuk, Professor at National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, key National expert of SFI project presented the main results of the RS-Inventory and opportunities for their use at the SE FoU. The task of such inventory is to provide a continuous record of time and area, as it has enabled the assessment of forests throughout Ukraine. In his presentation the attention was drawn to the following issues: methodology (types of field data, satellite time series, tracking forest dynamics) and results (forest area, forest users, dominant tree species, list of taxation indicators), as well as estimates for war-affected areas, damage assessment, caused to forests in 2022-2023, future steps in RS-Inventory. All results of RS-Inventory are now publicly available.
Vitaliy Storozhuk, National Project Coordinator, opened an extended view on the RS-Inventory results, demonstrating – based on some examples – its potentials with regard to an evaluation of forest statistical data and of proper implementation of relevant forest management decisions. The available RS-Inventory outcomes allow for rapid assessment of changes in forest cover, species composition, reforestation success, productivity, stand density and other indicators for effective forest monitoring.
Andriy Voronyi, Head of the Digital Harmonization Sector of the Development and IT Departmentof SE FoU, indicated interest in the RS-Inventory results and asked about the use of satellite images with a better resolution (then 20 x 20 m pixel used currently). “The objective of the RS-Inventory is to establish a basis for strategic forest management decision making. Processing of higher resolution images leads to increase in technical efforts and costs that should be justified by the results achieved by methods implemented.”, said Myroniuk in this regard.
Heino Polley, Leading SFI-International Expert, pointed out the methodological aspect that all these data were based on terrestrial NFI plots data as training data, therefore it is important to increase terrestrial NFI data collection to improve the RS-Inventory results.
Ihor Lytsur, Executive Director of SE FoU, thanked the speakers for the useful information and the opportunity to conduct a forest inventory for the SE FoU. He proposed to organise next meetings for further discussion options for using RS-Inventory outputs at SE FoU.
