News 2023
Participation in the Summit Vale Europeu
November 23, 2023
On November 22, 2023, the FlorestaSC team, together with the Environmental Military Police (PMA), participated in the Summit Vale Europeu, to launch the Forest Data Link product.
The event took place at the Blumenau Innovation Center and was organized by the Gene CIB Institute - Blumenau Blusoft Innovation Center and Conexão ESG.
Forest Data Link consists of a set of tools proposed by FlorestaSC, in support of PMA activities. These tools will facilitate PMA's access to FlorestaSC data, and will also serve as support for recording and collecting data in PMA's activities in the field and preparing reports and opinions.
Among the tools presented, mobile device applications for use in the field stood out, such as Avenza Maps and QField.
Avenza Maps is used for offline real-time navigation. The application loads and reads georeferenced maps in PDF format. For each PMA unit, PDF maps were generated containing geospatial information on: phytographic regions, limits of municipalities, limits of PMA units, potential restinga area, land use and cover and conservation units.
QField is a smartphone app that loads geospatial data from QGIS. In the field, you can use QField to register data and photos, draw polygons and calculate their area, and draw lines to calculate distances. This information collected in the field can later be transferred to QGIS for use on the desktop. To assist in learning the application, a tutorial was created for using the PMA.
The Interactive Data Panel (dashboard) was also presented, which was created with the aim of bringing together in a single place diverse information about the occurrence of species in the PMA Units, enabling users to carry out quick and varied data queries.
From the panel you can access: maps made to load on Avenza; the lists of the most abundant species in PMA units; to photos of the main characteristics of the species (leaf, fruit, flower, trunk) deposited on the Flora Digital de Santa Catarina (UFSC) website; and descriptions of the forest evaluated in the FlorestaSC plots.
Check out how the PMA Interactive Panel turned out: https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/dab44276-e21c-42f0-8657-bd7a8a5fc3fa/page/KtAKD
In addition to the tools mentioned above, other sources for consulting FlorestaSC data were shown, such as Sinflor - Forest Information System, the Maps Platform and the project website.
Check out other photos from the event below:
FlorestaSC at the IFN Brasil's Seminar
November 10, 2023
On November 6th and 7th, the FlorestaSC coordinator participated, at the invitation of the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB/MMA), in the National Seminar on Strategic Alignment of the National Forest Inventory of Brazil held in Brasília. The objective of the seminar was to provide strategic and technical input to strengthen the implementation of the IFN and increase its impact on national public policies and Brazil's international commitments. The event was attended by the General Director of the SFB, Garo Batmanian, the General Coordinator of Forestry Information at the SFB, Humberto Navarro and the Director of IFN Brasil, Tiago Cruz, as well as participants from public bodies and universities from all regions of the country. Brazil.
Santa Catarina's experiences in collecting, including using new technologies, processing and disseminating and applying data from Santa Catarina's forests were presented by prof. Alexander C. Vibrans, under the title IFN Santa Catarina – 16 years FlorestaSC.
On the second day, four working groups were formed to discuss and propose strategic actions on the topics of IFN Methodology, Data Dissemination, Institutional Arrangements and IFN and public policies.
Data collection in the field using a tablet
October 20, 2023
The advancement of technology has enabled important innovations in several areas, especially forestry research. The FlorestaSC team seeks to always be up to date with technological trends and has sought to modernize data collection and processing, whether through the application of advanced remote sensing and machine learning techniques to monitor changes in land use; use of programming language to perform various complex analyses; use of drones to collect data on plots, among others.
This year, the field team started using a tablet to record the data collected in the forest inventory's Sample Plots. Previously, records were made on paper cards, which required many hours of typing these data to be able to incorporate them into the database.
The use of the tablet required the implementation of two routines in our SINFLOR database (www.sinflor.com.br), one allowing the export of data from previous measurements of a given Sample Unit in excel format, for import to the tablet; another to re-import the new measurement data from the tablet into SINFLOR, followed by a consistency analysis of this data. The changes were implemented by systems analyst Vilmar Orsi, responsible since 2009 for developing and maintaining this FlorestaSC database.
To rationalize the use of the tablet in the field, the spreadsheets were customized, making it easier to navigate within the spreadsheets and enter new measurement data. In a short time, the new routines were successfully adopted by FlorestaSC teams in the field and in the laboratory, generating considerable time savings and eliminating sources of errors.
Use of drones on FlorestaSC's plots
April 19, 2023
In an unprecedented action, FlorestaSC began obtaining drone data on permanent plots. With the drone, multispectral images are acquired that will be processed to extract variables from the forest structure and identify species. The activity is being led by postdoctoral researcher Daniel Augusto da Silva (FlorestaSC/FURB), in partnership with Epagri and Udesc.
The first data collection was carried out last week (15/04) on plot nº 285, in Águas Mornas (SC), in the town of Vargem Grande. The equipment used was the drone/UAV, multispectral sensor, thermal and Lidar.
Participating in the collection were Alexander Christian Vibrans, coordinator of FlorestaSC, MSc. Adilson Luiz Nicoletti and Dr. Daniel Augusto da Silva, researchers in the areas of remote sensing and macro-ecological modeling, who took measurements of the vegetation and demarcated points for georeferencing; Epagri/CIRAM researchers Dr. Cristina Pandolfo, coordinator of the project “Use of multispectral and thermal UAV images for crop inspection” and Dr. Fábio Martinho Zambonim coordinator of the “Base PRA”* project; and the PPGPlan doctoral student at UDESC/Geolab, MSc. Guilherme Braghirolli, who helped with the use of the multispectral drone.
The action seeks to evaluate the potential of multispectral, thermal and LiDAR sensors to generate forest structural metrics, and through scientific research, propose evaluation methods that reduce the need for measurements, making inventories more efficient and operational.
Check out some photos:
FlorestaSC at the XX Brazilian Symposium on Remote Sensing
April 13, 2023
The XX Brazilian Symposium on Remote Sensing - SBSR, , organized by INPE and Selper Brasil, took place in Florianópolis (SC), between April 2nd and 5th. The Symposium is held every two years, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event has not taken place since 2019. The SBSR aims to bring together the technical-scientific community and business users in the areas of Remote Sensing and Geotechnologies to present works and debates on research, technological development, teaching and scientific policy carried out in the country and around the world.
FlorestaSC's researchers participated in the event: Alexander Christian Vibrans, Adilson Luiz Nicoletti and Daniel Augusto da Silva, as well as project collaborators Veraldo Liesenberg and Murilo Schramm da Silva.
During the event, researchers were able to learn about new technologies, tools and methodologies in Remote Sensing through lectures and courses, as well as expand technical-scientific contacts.
FlorestaSC's researchers presented some work at the event to publicize studies carried out by the project in remote sensing:
Mapping the forest cover of Santa Catarina [translated] (Alexander Vibrans) Read it – Text e Poster
Classification of Restinga Catarinense formations using the Random Forest algorithm [translated] (Adilson Nicoletti) Read it – Text e Poster
Forest fragmentation reduces leaf area in native forests [translated] (Daniel Silva) Read it – Text e Poster
Backdating of invariant pixels: comparison of algorithms for land use and land cover change (LUCC) detection in the subtropical brazilian atlantic forest. (Murilo Schramm) Read it– Text e Poster
Check out some photos of the event:
We changed our name and logo!
March 07, 2023
Why did we change from IFFSC to FlorestaSC?
The IFFSC team decided to update the visual identity of the Santa Catarina inventory. The name and logo changes were developed with the help of the “Repúblika” team, an experimental advertising agency from the FURB Advertising and Marketing course. The job was coordinated by Professor Fabrícia Durieux Zucco and Professor Leandro Werner Ribeiro (“Maka”) and carried out by the entire team of scholarship holders at the agency; to everyone involved, our “thank you” for this work!
This is our new logo, inspired by the brazilian walnut tree, the symbol of Santa Catarina.
Under this brand we work based on three groups of actions:
Here are gathered the works of monitoring the development of forests; we carried out data surveys in the field, processing the collected data and the botanical material collected in the FURB laboratories, as well as the analysis and publication of the results of these analyses.
Under this acronym, we gather remote sensing and geoprocessing work, which consists of mapping forest remnants and other land uses in Santa Catarina, as well as studies of changes observed over time.
The EducaSC team develops scientific dissemination and forestry education actions, especially for school audiences. We are preparing, together with a group of teachers from the state network, educational materials for use in elementary school, based on the information generated by MonitoraSC.
Along with these changes, we are implementing a redesign of the portal. We intend to facilitate access to the contents by the different users, the school public, the general public, technicians and researchers who are looking for data and information on the forests of Santa Catarina on the portal.
Ah, we also changed our address to www.floresta.sc.gov.br
Important: whoever accesses the old address (www.iff.sc.gov.br) will be automatically redirected to the new one.