The MAFIS project will develop and demonstrate at pre-operational level a service aimed at providing consistent and statistically reliable information on forests, by combining multi-spectral satellite data and SAR data, to monitor natural and planted forests growth and forest losses due to human activities or to natural phenomena.

The project will develop a specific methodology and will use Artificial Intelligence to routinely produce, at affordable customer price, high accuracy information consistent at local and supranational level. The resulting MAFIS service will provide information useful to different end-users both in the public domain (European, national and local level) and in the industrial domain (forest owners/producers, forestry companies and wood-forestry value chain).

The project combines multi-spectral and radar data, develops Artificial Intelligence algorithms to speed-up data analysis and information extraction and will implement a software procedure suitable to be run on a cloud infrastructure. The MAFIS service will be accessible through a delivery platform already developed by GMATICS that will be adapted to enable effective visualization of the forest related information for different users.

The achievement of the project objectives will be demonstrated over two test areas in Italy through comparison of the results obtained from the MAFIS methodology and software procedure with in-situ survey data. Validation of the results include the participation of end-users.

The MAFIS project will be implemented by a team that includes GMATICS (Prime), GEO-K, RDM Progetti and University of Molise.