Review of the Stakeholder Workshop on July 1st, 2026

“Will there be some kind of alert system if changes occur in particularly sensitive forest areas?” or “Can you change the colors in the legend and export the map to your own GIS?” – These and many other useful questions and valuable comments emerged from the discussions among the 35 participants at the EO4Nature stakeholder workshop on forests held on July 1, 2026.

Representatives from environmental agencies and local governments, as well as climate and nature conservation officers and scientists, took the opportunity to learn about the EO4Nature services on tree species, tree vitality, and CO₂ in regeneration areas. The focus was on how these services are structured, what information they provide, and how they can be used in forest management and natural climate protection.

Using the example of forest development in Saxon Switzerland National Park, the workshop illustrated what the user workflow on the EO4Nature portal is intended to look like. Future users provided helpful comments and suggestions on the presented drafts, which the EO4Nature development team gratefully accepted.

During the discussion, it also became clear that there is a great need for understandable background information—for example, on the accuracy of the data or on how to interpret the analysis results. To ensure that EO4Nature is easily accessible even to users with little or no knowledge of GIS and remote sensing, a training concept is being developed, which was presented by Luca Durstewitz from the GFZ Helmholtz Center for Geosciences. The plan includes interactive learning formats as well as accompanying informational resources designed to ease the learning curve, support users in working with the services, and specifically promote the development of specialized knowledge.