Ecosystem Forest Condition Account

A forest condition account provides a consistent framework for the observation, reporting and analysis of past trends and present conditions, can guide investments in the conservation or restoration of degraded ecosystems, and can mainstream the ecological values of forests in policy making and implementation.

Our forest condition account aggregates thirteen forest condition variables into a forest condition index to measure the similarity of different forest types to a reference condition based on observations in primary and protected forest sites. All variables can be calculated across every country at the European continent between 2000 and 2023 at yearly basis, and are mostly derived from Earth Observation to describe water availability (NDWI), soil organic carbon (SOC), the number of threatened forest birds, above ground biomass, ecosystem net primary productivity (NPP), forest connectivity, leaf area index (LAI), vegetation index (NDVI), fraction of green cover, severity of drought, tree (canopy) cover density, landscape naturalness and forest fragmentation. At local scale (e.g. province level) six variables are calculated at 10 to 20m spatial resolution. 
More information can be found in User Manual and Algorithm Theoretical Base Document. 

The Aries4People application has integrated a set of thirteen forest condition variables of which most are converted into forest condition indicators based on the optimal / reference condition, before being aggregated into a single forest condition index. 

The Early Adopters have used the application to generate their forest condition accounts. An example for the year 2022 can be found in the accounting table below. The reference conditions were not tuned per country, but calculated at continental scale to enable comparisons across countries.