MONITOR

Advances in forest monitoring have enabled the documentation of changes in global forest cover and carbon balance, as well as improvements in risk assessment. However, significant challenges remain with forest inventories, particularly the need for detailed, accurate, regular, and real-time information on forest conditions and management, with open access to such data.
The MONITOR project aims to address these challenges by developing new methods, tools, and validation protocols. These innovations will support the creation of a high-resolution, multi-source, national monitoring system for France, including its overseas territories. The methodology, which integrates satellite and terrestrial data, will also be directly applicable to other regions. The project will enhance data analysis capabilities, advancing knowledge in detecting, quantifying, and attributing forest responses to global change.

MONITOR will initially investigate when and how forest cover, biomass, and health change across French forests. These challenges will be addressed using methods that integrate satellite data (optical, radar, LiDAR) with ground data through deep learning techniques, applied to all French forests. France offers an exceptional testing ground for innovative technologies due to its diverse climatic conditions, forest types, disturbance regimes, and management intensities.
If successful, the project aims to establish global, annual forest monitoring systems over time. A key focus will be on attributing canopy transitions in forests to their underlying causes. The potential of high-resolution forest cover mapping will be harnessed by combining it with socio-economic data across the entire territory—for example, by cross-referencing information on reported forest volume removals, land management practices, ownership patterns, and biomass changes. MONITOR will dedicate significant resources and effort to ensure rigorous validation of its products.

MONITOR will also investigate how forest biodiversity changes across space and time. Current information on forest biodiversity is largely insufficient, with the forest understorey remaining significantly under-sampled. Building on decades of research, the project will develop and implement monitoring methods that can be scaled to cover all of France.
MONITOR will establish a nationwide network of acoustic sensors to monitor forest biodiversity, focusing on birds and bats, alongside efficient workflows for data processing. It will also support the deployment and coordination of microclimatic sensors in forest understoreys, biodiversity monitoring in protected areas, and state-of-the-art environmental DNA-based monitoring techniques. These initiatives will inform the development of scenarios through models of animal and plant biodiversity distribution under current and future conditions, using individual forest growth simulators and forest landscape simulators.

Additionally, MONITOR will examine the historical evolution of French forests through digitised aerial photographs and the extensive collection of tree rings available in research laboratories across France. The project will also leverage biological and geochemical indicators preserved in natural archives—such as lake sediments, soils, and peat bogs—which offer invaluable insights into habitat reconstruction over centuries or millennia.