The aim of the EU-FOCIS project is to develop and demonstrate a forest health and carbon (above-ground) monitoring product for Europe, using ESA open-source satellites, to support voluntary (and compliance) market investment in forest carbon initiatives. There are currently no operational AGB/carbon data products available across Europe at the fine spatial and high temporal resolution appropriate for continuous monitoring of VCM project inventory. The EU-FOCIS product will combine two EO data streams: 1) Spatially and temporally explicit estimates of terrestrial vegetation GPP (gross primary productivity) derived from ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2 MSI, and future CHIME and LSTM expansion satellite missions; and 2) well quantified ground measurements of AGB made with terrestrial laser scanning at individual tree level that will be used to parameterise and test new empirical models of forest AGB.
