The Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing, AUTh

Profile 

The Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing is a part of the Department of Forestry and Natural Environment which is one of the 44 departments of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The department is responsible for training more than 500 undergraduate and about 200 graduate students on all aspects of ecology and management of forest and range resources.

The unit carries out graduate and postgraduate teaching and is involved in research in the fields of environmental monitoring and management of natural ecosystems by using modern analysis methods and techniques including Remote Sensing, Geographic Information Systems, and Digital Photogrammetry. The Laboratory also organises lectures and seminars, national and international conferences, and encourages scientific cooperation and exchange with corresponding laboratories of Greek and foreign organisations, institutes, universities, companies and other public and private enterprises.

In recent years, the unit has undertaken research in the fields of environmental resource management, vegetation dryness monitoring, desertification modeling, soil erosion mapping, environmental degradation assessment, landscape ecology, forest fire modeling, and, biodiversity monitoring using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS) and Decision Support Systems (DSS).

Members of the laboratory have been involved in a large number of National as well as EU-funded projects. As a result of two recently granted projects the ‘National Observatory of Forests - NOF’ and the 'National Observatory of Forest Fires - NOFFi' have been established in the unit in collaboration with the Special Secretariat for Forests of Greece and the Interbalkan Environment Center.

Moreover, the unit is a member of EARSeL chairing the EARSeL Special Interest Group on Forest Fires (EARSeL-FFSIG). Finally, members of the unit:
are editors / guest editors in international journals and conference proceedings,
are members of the scientific or organising committee of different national and international events,
participate in national (Civil protection, Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change) as well as international committees (GOFC-GOLD Fire IT)



TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT and TOOLS

Facilities include a dedicated teaching laboratory equipped with regularly updated high-specification computing hardware and software. Moreover, a facility the so called Automated Cartography Unit that is dedicated to capture (digitizers and scanners), processing, integration, printing (printers and plotters) and archive of imaging and non-imaging datasets has been recently developed.

More specifically, the infrastructure of the unit includes:



Infrastructure description
Hardware

• 2 DELL Servers
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) 8TB
• 21 PCs και Workstations
• 18 PCs (Workstations) for teaching (dedicated lab)
• 4 Portable Computers
• B/W laser, colour laser and inkjet printers
• 2 Video Projectors
• A0, A3, A4 Scanners
• A0 Plotter
• THALES- MAGELLAN Differential GPS (2 receivers)
• GPS devices
• 1 OLYMPUS digital camera
• 1 ADC Infrared digital camera
• 1 Laser Rangefinder
• SVC 1024 hyperspectral radiometer

Software

• ArcGIS 10.2 (AUTh site license)
• ArcIMS 4.0, WEB server, SQL
• ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise 10.2
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• ERDAS Imagine 2013 (5 licenses)
• ENVI 4.8 (5 licenses)
• eCognition Developer 8.7 (5 licenses)
• PCI Geomatics (1 license)
• IDRISI Selva (1 license)

Source