Norwegian University of Life Sciences | Norges miljø- og biovitenskapelige universitet – (NMBU)

NMBU’s formal history goes back to 1859 when the Agricultural Collage of Norway was established. After a merger between the Agricultural University of Norway and the Norwegian School of Veterinary Medicine in 2014, NMBU was formally established. NMBU is Norway’s leading academic institution within bio-production, life sciences, environment and landscape. NMBU employs 1700 people and has about 5200 students distributed on the two main campuses in Oslo and in Ås – 30 km south of Oslo. NMBU’s educational programs and research are focused on the major challenges of our time – sustainable development, food safety and animal welfare, climate change and mitigation, renewable energy, food production and management of natural resources. These activities are perused in seven faculties. Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management (MINA) is the formal project partner on the NOBEL project. The Section of Forest Inventory at MINA is among the most productive research groups at NMBU as a whole. It has a long history of development of operational forest inventory methods, especially based on remotely sensed data, and has made significant contributions to management tools for suitable forest management. In recent years, the Section has become renown worldwide for the development of airborne laser scanning as an operational method in forest management inventories – methods that have been adopted by companies and agencies on all five continents. This effort has a strong scientific basis, and the team of around 10 students and researchers has published more than 200 peer-review scientific articles in leading journals in recent years. Because MINA also has an active community of ecologists and wildlife biologist, synergistic research on ecosystem services in forests has been an ever more important part of the scientific activity of the Section. This has led to numerous successful efforts to support e.g. the Norwegian Environmental Protection Agency in its strive for better and more efficient monitoring of for example alien and black-listed species, old-growth natural forests, large old oaks and coastal heath lands – all  important elements of a future national biodiversity monitoring system.

Main tasks in NOBEL

• NMBU is leader for WP1: Geographic information and auction platform
• NMBU will undertake research and demonstrations on extraction and prediction of FES indicators based on
• 1) advanced remote sensing techniques,
• 2) remote sensing data offered by national programs in many European countries,
• 3) existing databases and
• 4) in particular data from the pan-European flagship program COPERNICUS.
• NMBU will assess available spatial data and information to map FES, and populate SIP-CMS with data.