BREATHE
News
Technical Meeting 5
Technical Meeting 5 took place in Ankara, Türkiye in January 2024 co-organized by GeoVille (Lead) and its Turkish partner Globetech, with the participation of The University of Istanbul, The Turkish General Directorate of Forestry (OGM), and the three Austrian subcontractors: The Environment Agency Austria – Umweltbundesamt (UBA), SISTEMA and the University of Vienna.
GeoVille has developed a Sentinel-2-derived forest disturbance model at 10m spatial resolution based on artificial intelligence methods, at countrywide level for Austria and Türkiye, plus a fire delineation and severity model in Türkiye, for carbon accounting of Above-Ground-Biomass (AGB) annual losses and increments. SISTEMA produced in collaboration with NASA the AGB annual status maps at 30m spatial resolution over Austria and Türkiye for the period 2019-2022 using GEDI Spaceborne LiDAR, the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel (HLS) product, the Copernicus DEM and Sentinel-1 SAR data combined with field sample plots provided by Umweltdata GmbH for calibration/validation of the models. UBA is involved in capacity strengthening activities, supporting the user requirements for Türkiye and the enhancement of the CO2 emissions from biomass burning calculations. UNIVIE contributes in improving GHG flux estimates using the Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART for the dispersion of CO plumes resulting from selected wildfires. Further work on FLEXPART will focus on the integration of improved satellite data such as Sentinel-3 Hot Spot Fire Radiative Power and Sentinel-5P TROPOMI. Globetech is in charge of the overall IT System running on a European cloud infrastructure linked to a user dashboard customized to OGM’s needs, ensuring with GeoVille the scalability of services to the carbon compliance and voluntary markets. Midterm report of the last research year is scheduled at the end of March, with a foreseen end of the project by November 2024
User Meeting 3
Technical Meeting 4
The third BREATHE user meeting together with the fourth technical meeting took place on October 18th and were hosted by The Environment Agency Austria (Umweltbundesamt GmbH) at their premises in Vienna, with the in-person participation of ministerial representatives from The Turkish General Directorate of Forestry (Orman Genel Müdürlüğü”, OGM) and the BREATHE Consortium: GeoVille (Lead), Turkish partner Globetech, SISTEMA and The University of Vienna.
UBA supports the BREATHE Consortium in gathering feedback from the Turkish stakeholders OGM and LULUCF scientific expert. Pr. Yusuf Serengil from the University of Istanbul on the results of the first research year of BREATHE and its concluding report, as well as their requirements for the next phase of the project, to make sure these are in accordance with the needs of the Turkish GHG National Inventory Report, as well as in compliance with the recommendations from the UNFCCC Expert Review Team (ERT) and the newly released 2023 revision of the LULUCF regulation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/839/oj
Technical Summer
Meeting 3
The BREATHE Technical Meeting took place on the 21st of June in Innsbruck. This time, it was GeoVille hosting it’s Turkish partner Globetech and the three subcontractors, Environment Agency Austria (Umweltbundesamt UBA), SISTEMA and University of Vienna. This is the 3rd meeting that took place in-person since the beginning of the year, showing a close team collaboration, the engagement and enthusiasm of all stakeholders towards the achievement of the BREATHE project. The main focus of this technical meeting was the finalization of the methods and results for the Final Report of the 1st research year.
Technical Kick-Off
Meeting 2
Another successful BREATHE meeting in Ankara! The Technical Meeting 2 took place in Ankara, at Turkish partner GlobeTech’s premises on Hacettepe University campus. One of the main scopes of this meeting was achieved with the integration of satellite, in-situ and ancillary data into Globetech IT cloud platform. The first tangible results of forest disturbance mapping over two uses cases in Austria and Türkiye, including fire delineation in the Istanbul District are now available and promising.
Technical Kick-Off
Meeting
Successful and promising start of the BREATHE project, “Earth observation Based Enhancement and Verification of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories for Forest and Biomass, with the Technical Kick-off Meeting and 1st User Meeting, which took place end of January in Ankara, Turkey, on the campus of the renowned Hacettepe Ankara Technical University, a world-class research University, where Turkish partner GlobeTech has established its headquarters.
& First User
Meeting
A small group of 5 Austrian partners made the trip to Ankara, including 3 representative staff members from GeoVille, leader of the BREATHE Consortium: Nathalie Morin BREATHE project manager, Norman Kiesslich,
LULUCF advisor, and Dominic Hewitt, technical expert on biomass and forest disturbance mapping, Erwin Moldaschl from Umweltbundesamt Austrian Environment Agency (UBA), in charge of the GHG National Inventory Report (NIR), and Stefano Natali, CEO of industrial partner Sistema, expert on Above Ground Biomass mapping from Spaceborne
satellites.
Our Turkish host, GlobeTech, a private company in GIS-based decision support solutions for Turkey’s leading institutions, were Yesim Kinikoglu, another female BREATHE project manager on the Turkish side – supporting UN Sustainable Goal 5 on Gender Equity -, Kagan Cintimur, CEO and cofounder of GlobeTech with software developers Volkan Caliskan – also BREATHE technical project manager – and Tolga Kaya, plus 3 additional new women staff members, all dedicated towards the achievement of the IT component and the forest wildfire case studies over Istanbul district and in the Antalya Mediterranean ecoregion.
The technical meeting was strengthened by the additional online participation of experts from GeoVille, TurkStat, as well as Pr. Yusuf Serengil, LULUCF scientific expert from Istanbul University and Pr. Andreas Stohl, from University of Vienna, international expert and developer of the FLEXPART Lagrangian particle dispersion models for inverse modeling and transport modelling of GHG emissions.
All formed the ingredients of a detonative cocktail in support to the EO-based method developments for quantifying CO2 emissions and removals from biomass changes, which stands out as one of the current major uncertainties in GHG monitoring.
