OSM Data mining for forest and environmental parameters in Europe

The proposed workshop addresses all levels of the open geospatial community and will present principles basics of free and open source geospatial data as well as particular methodology and tools to perform data mining for environmental and forestry applications. Participants of the three hour workshop will perform particular practical applications to query and extract various spatial data and information from open source geospatial repositories, like OSM, EU data archives and other sources The workshop will start with a short motivational talk which discusses the variety of OSM and Open Source GIS applications for forestry and environmental planning, such as mapping of forest road infrastructure, skidding trails for certification, timber logistics and the use of routing systems using only free and open geospatial data. In addition the talk will present other applications like biomass quantification, yield assessments and forest management tools. During the 3 h workshop participants will learn about the principles of the data model of free geospatial data and will apply various free software tools for querying the OSM and other open source environmental repositories. The participants will perform individual data mining and queries in order to extract particular forest parameters and environmental information like forest road infrastructure, forest and non-forest land, tree densities, major tree species and forest heights using several different open data repositories. Participants will make active use of and test of various OS geospatial software and will be informed about different particular free and open data resources and repositories offering particular emphasis on environmental indicators and forest management parameters like CORINE Land Cover, ICESat/GLAS canopy height Data, EFI data and EU forest tree species map. The selection of parameters and the expected query results will stimulate a discussion among participants about further opportunities and technical challenges implementing free geo-data and open source software systems in the field of environmental and forestry management Since some years the GIS department of the University for Sustainable Development Eberswalde and the private company Datalyze Solutions, Berlin are using successfully open GIS software packages for academic teaching and geospatial project implementation, such as data mining and real time sensor data integration and analysis.