Case Study: Forest Management Institute Czech Republic assesses €200M in bark beetle timber damage with Planet

Assessing EUR200m of timber damage from the 2018 bark beetle outbreak

The Forest Management Institute Czech Republic (FMI), a governmental organization, faced the challenge of assessing the widespread damage from a 2018 bark beetle outbreak across the country's forests. They needed to identify devastated areas to help mitigate risk and deploy resources efficiently, but a lack of recent, high-resolution data on a national scale made this difficult. To overcome this, FMI turned to vendor Planet and utilized their PlanetScope satellite imagery.

Using Planet's high-cadence, high-resolution PlanetScope data, FMI created a countrywide mosaic to perform a detailed geospatial analysis. This solution allowed them to detect areas of sanitary logging and dead forest stands. The results were significant; FMI determined that €200 million worth of timber was impacted, and their publicly available map achieved approximately 85% accuracy, enabling better legislation and helping forest owners optimize their harvesting resources.

Forest Management Institute Czech Republic

Petr Lukeš

Remote Sensing Scientist