Assessment of potential bioenergy from coppice forests trough the integration of remote sensing and field surveys

Abstract

Abstract A spatially explicit knowledge of forest resources is essential to support the sustainable use of wood as a fuel for producing energy (firewood). This paper describes the integrated use of remotely sensed data and sample based forest inventories to derive a biomass map for coppice forest, resulted estimated potential biomass available is contrasted with local domestic consumptions at the municipality level. The test was carried out in an environmentally and socially homogeneous district of Apennine Mountains (Alto Molise, south-central Italy) coupling multispectral high resolution Landsat 7 ETM+ satellite imagery and a local forest inventory trough the application of the non-parametric estimation procedure k -Nearest Neighbours ( k -NN). Several forest management scenarios were applied in order to evaluate their impact on the potential availability of firewood from coppice forests. The paper introduces data and methods used and presents the achieved results both in terms of the accuracy of the biomass map produced by k -NN and of the relationship between the potential availability and demand for firewood. These results demonstrated that k -NN is able to estimate the biomass of coppice forest in the test area with an accuracy level comparable with recent similar application of k -NN carried out in Boreal regions (RMSE of 25.6%). The application of different forest management scenarios have a significant impact on local estimated firewood balance between potential supply from coppice forests and demand for domestic consumption, depending of the scenarios the net balance changed up to 84%.