The Forest Explorer is a web application that allows easy browsing of the contents of the Forest Inventories and Maps of the Iberian Peninsula. It accesses a linked open data source created from the original data in the European Cross-Forest project. The application is available at https://forestexplorer.gsic.uva.es/ explorer/ and can be accessed with a simple web browser on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. The user interface hides the complexity of the underlying technologies, providing an interactive map to navigate to the area of interest and presenting the forest data in appropriate detail. The application is suitable for professional as well as casual use by science communicators, data journalists or citizens.
CEUR ceur-ws.org
Modern forestry science increasingly relies on the use of large datasets [1]. Among these, national forest inventories and land cover maps are of particular importance. These datasets are created and published as open data by national governments, to be used by diferent agents, including forest stakeholders, operational foresters, data and environmental journalists, or interested citizens. However, these datasets are dificult to use, especially if integrated access is required, as they are created following diferent methodologies and published in a diversity of formats. Semantic Web technologies can potentially facilitate the integration and promote the usage of these datasets, but the lack of knowledge by forestry agents in these technologies makes it necessary for tools to ifll this gap.
Cross-Forest1 was a European project working on the integration of forest inventories
and land cover maps data from Spain and Portugal with Semantic Web technologies. The
source datasets included: (
CEUR Workshop Proceedings htp:/ceur-ws.org ISN1613-073
Nacional, IFNes) based on the use of a of a 1x1 kilometer grid, with a plot2 at each
point of the grid. (
In the Cross-Forest project the ontologies are developed using a bottom-up methodology.
First, modeling the relevant concepts and relations in each source. Second, identifying and
describing concepts and relations shared among several sources (such as species, positions,
and measures). And third, generalizing related concepts within the same domain (i.e.,
forest inventories and land use). This leads to a modular ontology comprised by three sets
of modules: (
However, potential users lack the necessary knowledge in Semantic Web technologies to properly exploit these results. Hence, we present the Forest Explorer, a web application that allows to navigate the content of the published LOD datasets, and download their data for a selected area.
The Forest Explorer makes the Iberian forest inventories and land cover maps accessible to potential users. It makes use of the LOD datasets published in the Cross-Forest project. Its logical architecture can be seen in Figure 1. The Map generator is in charge of displaying the view for the end user, employing a base map obtained from the Map server, and listening to the requests made from the diferent Feature 12 Managers to show markers, polygons, popups, or tooltips on top of the map. The activation of diferent 2Sample locations where dendrometric observations (such as tree density or wood volume) are taken 3Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics. See http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/ 4Homogeneous areas of land delimited by polygons 5MDB Tools (https://github.com/mdbtools/mdbtools) and Mapshaper (https://github.com/mbloch/mapshaper) 6https://github.com/Cross-Forest/ 7https://datos.iepnb.es/def/sector-publico/medio-ambiente/ 8https://snig.dgterritorio.gov.pt/ 9http://www.europeandataportal.eu/ 10https://forestexplorer.gsic.uva.es/sparql/ 11https://obofoundry.org/ontology/ncbitaxon.html 12Features in the Forest Explorer include provinces, patches, plots, and trees feature managers depends on the zoom level. The Data manager handles all data requests from the Feature managers. This component communicates with the SPARQL endpoints using a REST API created with CRAFTS [5], configured to use the Cross-Forest and DBpedia13 endpoints. Data requests include geospatial queries for obtaining the features in a bounding box, as well as information requests about the details of a feature. Upon receipt of a request, the Data manager first checks if the result is already available in the Data cache. In case of a miss, the Data manager sends a call to the REST API, which in turn sends one or more SPARQL queries to the endpoints.
The user interface allows zooming and panning intuitively with the mouse or a touch screen, as well as through explicit zoom and positioning buttons. The data displayed depends on the zoom level. Figure 2 illustrates these levels, starting with the northwesternmost region of the Iberian peninsula and zooming in into the Geres-Xures Transboundary Biosphere Reserve14, on the border between the north of Portugal and Spain. The furthest level, shown in Subfigure 2(a), presents aggregated data by NUTS3 regions of Portugal and Spain. Zooming in shows three diferent layers with the data of the land cover maps (MFE and COS), each one with increasing detail, in order to facilitate visibility and reduce data transfer. Information about land use, area, density of species, and (in the case of Spain) canopy cover15 of a patch can be displayed by hovering over it. Subfigure 2(b) shows one of such levels. When the zoom level is close enough, the plots of the IFNes are displayed, as seen in Subfigure 2(c). Hovering over a plot shows its associated dendrometric measures. Finally, maximum zoom level on a plot reveals the surveyed trees, their position, and the dendrometric measures taken for each one of them. Subfigure 2(d) shows the content of a plot.
A form in the upper left corner provides several functionalities: (
The Forest Explorer makes visually accessible the map of species composition of an area and make easy the access to its data. This facilitates operational foresters and forest stakeholders make silvicultural simulations for selecting managing alternatives needed for precision forestry, and helps environmental journalists or interested citizens visualize forest composition or discover areas with the presence of an species.
The Forest Explorer is developed in JavaScript, to facilitate its deployment as a Web 13To provide images and multilingual descriptions of tree species 14https://www.reservabiosferageresxures.eu 15The proportion of the forest covered by the vertical projection of the tree crowns [6] 16https://www.geonames.org/
Province manager
Patch manager
manager
JSON
CRAFTS
SPARQL
b d application. It is portable and can be used on any device with a modern browser (it has been successfully tested with the latest versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on various smartphones, tablets, and personal computers). It is publicly available at https://forestexplorer.gsic.uva.es/explorer/. A video recording showcasing the functionalities of the Forest Explorer interface can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24131916
The Forest Explorer is a Web application to navigate, visualize, and selectively download the contents of the Spanish and Portuguese national forest inventories and land cover maps without needing to understand the underlying Semantic Web technologies of which it makes use. This makes this important data available to diferent forestry agents and lay users without requiring from them any knowledge of Semantic Web technologies.
The Cross-Forest dataset and the Forest Explorer are living projects. Our current and future work includes adding the temporal dimension (by combining previous and upcoming new versions of inventories and land cover maps) and incorporating spatial planning data. We also envision extending the approach to other territories beyond the Iberian peninsula.
This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through LOD.For.Trees (TED2021-130667B-I00) and IMFLEX (PID2021-1262750B-C22) projects and by the Junta de Castilla y León through CLU-2019-01 and CL-EI-2021-05 projects, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.