Research

This research project will revolutionize forest inventory throughout Austria in a long-term and sustainable way. Thus, the project is of nationwide relevance . Due to the practical and target group oriented nature of the project, the research results will be available to a broad audience and will provide forest owners, forest enterprises, service providers and authorities with a planning tool for the creation and maintenance of climate-smart forests. The methods to be developed in the project should be implementable as a standard solution for the highly precise and spatially explicit inventory of raw wood reserves and the operational planning of forest enterprises based on it. By combining modern, laser-based field survey methods (partly with commercially available mobile devices such as Apple iPhone and iPad) and remote sensing methods, planning uncertainties of careful and sustainable forest management can be minimized, the productivity of different timber harvesting methods can be predicted and thus the risks and costs of forest enterprises can be reduced. The methods thus contribute to the preservation of protective forest tasks and nature conservation functions as well as to the establishment of "climate-smart" mountain forests in Austria. The Austrian forest ownership communities and larger forest enterprises with regular sample inventory and forest management benefit from digital inventory solutions with person-carried laser scanners (PLS) as well as the area-accurate stock and assortment and productivity forecasts achieved by combining PLS data with remote sensing data. Low-threshold access to an easy-to-use and digital inventory and planning tool will create incentives for regular and sustainable forest management in Austria's small private forests.

As a result of global warming increased exceptional floods and extreme heavy precipitation events take place. So the risk of remobilization of deposits increases. Subsequently radioactive heavily contaminated sediments can be mobilized. At LLC-Laboratory Arsenal radioactivity of the danube compartiments: water (dissolved radionuclides), suspended matter and sediment are continuously monitored based on monthly composite samples and event-related samples during floods since 1984. This is a unique Central European radioecological long time series of measurements. The continuation of this sampling and data collection is of great importance to meet future challenges in radiation protection with regard to potential large-scale environmental contamination.

Our vision is to further develop the isotope-sample collection module for analysis with the more available laser based systems for isotope analysis. The idea is that system could fit on to any suitable commercially available drone or blimp and that could be controlled independently of the drone system. We have developed such a system for isotope ratio mass spectrometer systems in FFG projects Iso-2-Drone, but developing the system for laser would significantly improve the reach and applicability of the system. In the initial months the isotope-sample collection module will be constructed and programmed to fit a suitable commercially available drone or blimp; this will be an iterative process dependent on the method of sample collection. The specific objective of the project will be to develop an isotope-sample collection module to fit on to a commercially available drone or blimp. We will test whether the system can then be meshed with the CDR laser systems for isotope analysis. We have made a number of methodological improvements that would allow us to sample 18-O and the greenhouse gases CO2, Methane and nitrous oxide. We now seek to determine whether this would be possible on the CDRS system.