The forest and its ecological function
This involves two major concerns:
Environmental protection
At the present time, environmental protection is an essential issue, beyond the objective of regular wood production. In a global context where the environment, and tropical forests in particular, appear to be seriously threatened, forest management is a mean of guaranteeing the protection of biodiversity and sustainable management. The forest manager's first step is to analyse the environment in order to identify and map all natural elements, particularly those that are noteworthy, rare or threatened. The Pleiades data will thus be supplying observations for:
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Global change
forests and woodlands represent the largest component of present and future land use in terms of surface area, and play an important role in the global carbon balance. Global change has, and will continue to have, major repercussions on forest cover. Forests are communities with a long life; rapid changes in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and the increase in temperature associated with climatic changes will probably have an important effect not only on future forests but on those that already exist. Current modifications to forest coverage caused by the social and economic agents of global change will merge with the modifications of these bio-physical agents. Satellite data from the Pleiades program will provide the information required to predict the interactive effects of global change on forests, by supplying information on the following:
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