Will continental forest data enable downstream services for regional studies? Global and pan-European forest change maps under a closer look.

Forests’ status and dynamics are important variables for the evaluation and monitoring of ecosystems and their biodiversity. In the framework of implementing the objectives of the Convention of Biological Diversity, Germany developed a national action plan (National Biodiversity Strategy) to enhance conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. One of the identified goals of this action plan is to increase the proportion of unmanaged forest to five percent of total forest area and ten percent of state forest, respectively. Following this action plan, each federal state has to implement this goal until 2020. To ensure high impact in protecting biodiversity, forest areas with high conservation value are aimed to be selected in a systematic conservation planning framework and taken out of management. For this selection procedure area-wide spatially explicit and accurate data are essential. The aim of this study is to identify the best available data set for evaluating forest cover and its dynamics for the German federal state Baden-WA¼rttemberg. Various data sources regarding forest dynamics (from year 2000 to 2013) and covering Europe are currently or will be publicly available for further analysis. Most of these data sources claim to enable downstream services. Two main sources are taken under consideration: on global scale the high-resolution global map of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change (Hansen et al. 2013) and on European scale the already available pan-European forest map of 2000 of the Joint Research Centre (Pekkarinen et al 2009) and the upcoming high resolution forest layer of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Services for the year 2013. While the global map already provides forest change information, the change map based on European data will be processed based on the two European data sets applying the morphological change detection methodology proposed by Seebach et al (2013). Forest gains and losses of both global and European dataset will be evaluated within an elaborated validation framework based on spatial forest inventory information available for the state forest of Baden-WA¼rttemberg and available orthophotos for the years 2000 and 2013.