Forests are crucial for the Green Deal’s goals, including biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and carbon sequestration. At the same time, they are already under significant pressure, with as much as 70% of stands being damaged due to extreme weather and pathogens. Managing these complex ecosystems is slowed by a lack of accessible, high-quality data and accessible decision support tools.
The Forest Data Space (FDS) aims to revolutionize this by improving access and use of sensitive data. The FDS framework supports the decision-making capabilities with data integration and sharing, facilitated by secure, interoperable standards.
The FDS a federated, privacy aware infrastructure that connects national and regional forest data ecosystems, including NFIs, satellite observations, and IoT sensor networks. All related datasets are federated under well-defined governance rules to maintain data sovereignty, providing a scalable, data-driven model for sustainable forest management within the EU’s Green Deal initiative.
The FDS is designed to align with broader EU-level priorities such as the EU Forest Strategy, the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), and climate adaptation frameworks. As specified in the DIGITAL-2024-CLOUD-AI-06-GREENDEAL call, the FDS supports biodiversity, zero pollution, and climate adaptation goals by enabling use cases that derive value from sensitive and heterogeneous environmental datasets while preserving confidentiality and integrity.
By delivering measurable ecological, economic, and social value across this diverse user landscape, the FDS contributes directly to the Green Deal’s ambition of a fair, green, and digitally empowered Europe. It provides the foundation for collaborative, scalable, and sustainable forest management, where data becomes a shared asset and a catalyst for resilience, transparency, and long-term impact.
The Forest Transformation Planning and Implementation use case leverages the FDS to enable forest owners, practitioners, and researchers to develop and implement adaptive management strategies that enhance ecological and economic sustainability.
The use case centres on utilizing continuous, integrated data collection from, among others, National Forest Inventories (NFI) as well as regional local forest inventories, combined with satellite imagery and In-Situ-Sensor data to formulate and implement transformation plans with a focus on biodiversity enhancement, sustainable exploitation, and climate adaptation.
The use case concentrates around the following three key questions:
- Which forest stands are to be prioritized for forest conversion?
- Which tree species are suitable at a certain location to withstand future climate requirements?
- How can forest conversion be achieved when considering biodiversity, profitability, and climate function?
The transformation plans will be dynamically adjusted based on real-time environmental feedback and periodic NFI data updates, ensuring that the forest management practices are responsive and proactive.
The SAGE (Sustainable Green Europe Data Space) project targets the four strategic pillars in the European Green Deal— Zero Pollution, Climate Adaptation, Biodiversity, and the Circular Economy Action Plan, by implementing a rich portfolio of use cases in each of them.
The project demonstrates a total of 10 pilot use cases to foster data-driven sustainability solutions across biodiversity, climate, circular economy, and pollution monitoring. Below you can read about one of these pilots.
The overview of all use cases can be found here: Use-cases
Use case objective
The main objectives of the FDS are threefold:
- improve the availability of high-quality data for private and public decision-making processes
- help to implement a forest monitoring system to enhance forest health tracking, biodiversity conservation, and environmental impact assessments
- foster open innovation
The Forest Transformation Planning and Implementation use case aims at guiding the transformation of forests towards enhanced ecological, economic, and social outcomes, aligned with the GDDS initiatives. By doing so, it addresses the following use case specific objectives:
- Building a modular, privacy-aware, and federated FDS that supports policy reporting, resilience planning, and sustainable value chains — with potential to scale horizontally across domains.
- Anchored in national, regional and local forest data ecosystems (including NFIs)
- Addressing EU-level demands (e.g., EUDR, EU Forest Strategy)
- Aligned with MIM4DS, SIMPL, and DSSC architecture vision
End users
The FDS, developed within the framework of the European Green Deal Data Space (GDDS), supports forest owners, practitioners, and researchers in developing and implementing adaptive management strategies aimed at strengthening the ecological and economic sustainability of forests.
Forest inventory data can be shared by national research institutes, public authorities, and private sector actors—while data owners always retain full sovereignty and control over their data. Forestry practitioners benefit from access to processed, high-quality, AI-ready data to make data-driven decisions that enhance forest health, strengthen climate resilience and promote biodiversity.
In addition, the FDS fosters innovation in the private sector by enabling technology providers to develop value-added applications in geospatial analytics, artificial intelligence, and monitoring systems.
Objectives/Benefits
The goal of the FDS is to improve the availability of high-quality data for decision-making processes in both the public and private sectors. The use case aims to support the transformation of forests towards ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable structures, in line with the objectives of the EU Green Deal. Specifically, the following goals are pursued:
- Building a modular, privacy-aware, and federated FDS that supports policy reporting, resilience planning, and sustainable value chains — with potential to scale horizontally across domains
- Anchoring the FDS in national, regional, and local forest data ecosystems (including National Forest Inventories – NFIs)
- Addressing EU-level requirements (e.g., EUDR, EU Forest Strategy)
- Aligning with the architectural visions of MIM4DS, SIMPL, and DSSC
- Developing a combined remote sensing and ground-based biodiversity monitoring tool to assess species diversity and identify conservation priorities
By integrating data and tools within the FDS, climate-related risks can be mitigated and revenues secured. Moreover, the FDS contributes to the promotion of biodiversity and the social and recreational functions of forests
Benefits
- Access to high-quality, large-scale, real-time forestry data
- Simplified analysis of current and future forest conditions
- Comprehensive data foundation for the development of new AI tools for forestry
- Optimization of forestry services and spatial planning
- Improved transparency regarding forest damage and development potential
- Decision support for policy measures aimed at protecting and preserving European forests
- Promotion of international exchange of forestry information within Europe
- Monitoring and control of environmental pollution and forest damage to safeguard public health
Tech provider
wetransform is a German IT company focused on data transformation and interoperability. Its mission is to contribute to building a sustainable, data-driven world by harmonizing and providing high-quality data. wetransform offers software solutions for managing, transforming, harmonizing, and publishing geospatial and environmental data, and actively supports the success of the Green Data Community.
wetransform takes the technical lead in the Forest Transformation Planning and Implementation use case, with a focus on the following activities:
- Development of the Forest Data Space application
- Integration of high-quality forestry datasets
- Implementation of assessment and decision-support tools for climate-resilient forest transformation
- Technical support for end users
Rockwood Digital Europe (RDE) is a digital innovation consultancy focused on sustainable, data-driven transformation. Within the use case, RDE is contributing to stakeholder engagement, forest ERP integration, and financial/business model design for long-term sustainability.
Participants – end users
The forest transformation and implementation use case is not focusing on one specific user, but it rather aiming at involving and/or benefiting an entire ecosystem of users. The envisages ecosystem includes:
- Data providers such as National Forest Inventories, government agencies (i.e state forests), environmental data providers, and private forestry companies that supply comprehensive forest data
- Forestry end users such as Forestry businesses, state forests, SMEs, and environmental NGOs
- Policy makers, regulators, certification bodies, environmental agencies, PEFC, FSC
- Technology providers such as companies specializing in data analytics, AI, and digital platforms
- Research institutions and RTOs that use the data for forest ecology studies, climate adaptation strategies, and to inform policy recommendations.
Expected results
EU-wide Forest Data Space with basic data coverage: A federated and modular forest data infrastructure will be established across EU Member States, enabling interoperable and secure data exchange..
Privacy preserving processing of (National and Regional) Forest Inventories: Innovative spatial privacy methods and metadata governance will ensure that sensitive data particularly from NFIs is processed and shared in compliance with privacy requirements.
Integrated value-added apps and services: Multiple tiers of services (Basic, Professional, Enterprise) will be built on top of the Forest Data Space, including compliance reporting dashboards, AI-based health predictions, and biodiversity trend analytics.
Better AI models through access to large pools of training data: With harmonized and richly annotated forest datasets available across the EU, AI specialists and research institutes will be able to train more accurate models for detecting forest degradation, predicting disease outbreaks, and modeling ecological changes.
Better standard solutions for current challenges: Standardized data formats, metadata schemas, and governance models developed through the FDS initiative will offer ready to implement templates for forest health assessments, compliance audits, and biodiversity reporting.
Integrated compliance reporting tools: Tools will be developed to streamline compliance with European and international forest management regulations.
Contact
Franziska Hochenegger, wetransform
Email: fh@wetransform.to
Web: www.wetransform.to
