Development of Methodologies and Standardized Services for Supporting Forest Economics.

In the Mediterranean region, many types of forests are non-productive or degraded, although they could substantially contribute to growth of local economies. In Greece, 30% of the total area is covered by forests, however their contribution to the GDP is almost non-existent. An example is the chestnut production in Thessaly region of Greece, and especially in Mouzaki municipality, which is almost abandoned due to insufficient agricultural policies concerning establishment of alternative crops, and consequently leads to loss of potential income for the rural economy. The ARTEMIS project, funded by the Greek Secretariat for Research and Technology, aims at delivering an innovative information platform providing systematically high quality Earth Observation based products and services for monitoring forest health and supporting eventually the growth of forestry related economy and market. The architecture of the proposed platform will incorporate new OGC/ISO technologies, while the applicability of existing metadata standards for management of geospatial datasets will be evaluated. A pilot implementation of the developed system will be conducted in a selected area in Thessaly region of Greece.