ProtectForest

The project ProtectForest was created in order to respond to the increasing bark beetle infestations. Since 1st November 2018 the project is funded by the FNR – Federal Agency for Sustainable Raw Materials. Project partners are the Dept. of Work Science and Engineering (Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany), the Chair of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems (Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany), the University of Applied Science for Forestry (HFR Rottenburg, Germany) and the company Cadmium GmbH (Regenstauf, Germany). The aim is to build and test a drone-based semi-conductor gas sensor, which can detect alpha Pinene, a volatile component of the tree resin. The sensor should detect trees, which were infested by the bark beetle. The advantage of this approach is the possibility to detect infested trees directly after infestation. The foresters can react immediately and cut the infested trees to prevent a large-scale outbreak. This method is an improvement in comparison to conventional approaches, e.g. multispectral picture analysis, which can only detect trees several weeks or even month after the initial infestation. Therefore, the conventional methods can not prevent a large scale bark beetle infestation.