Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing

The Laboratory of Forest Management and Remote Sensing (FMRS) is a part of the School of Forestry and Natural Environment, which is one of the 44 departments of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). 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 conducts research in the fields of environmental monitoring and management of natural ecosystems (with a specific focus on wildfire-related research topics among others), exploiting a fusion of earth observation (EO), machine learning and geographic information systems (GIS) technologies. FMRS also organizes lectures and seminars, national and international conferences, and encourages scientific cooperation and exchange with corresponding laboratories of Greek and foreign organizations, institutes, universities, companies and other public and private enterprises. FMRS has extensive and long-term experience in the fields of forest management, Earth Observation, environmental resource management, vegetation dryness monitoring, desertification modelling, soil erosion mapping, environmental degradation assessment, landscape ecology, forest fire mapping and monitoring, and biodiversity monitoring using GIS, remote sensing and decision support systems. It has also extensive experience in implementing and providing national-wide operation services based on EO data to different stakeholders, including Greece’s Central Forest Service and General Secretariat for Civil Protection.