PRELIMINARY FINDINGS ON REMOTE SENSING OF FOREST COVER CHANGE, FOREST AND TREE HEALTH IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE

Abstract. Forests are important to people, wildlife and climate. Yet, not all forests are healthy throughout time. Unhealthy forests are providing fewer services and productions to people, harbouring less biodiversity and regulating less climate. Here, the preliminary findings are presented in a literature review on remote sensing measuring the changes in forest cover and the health of forest and of trees in Southeastern Europe including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia. The aim is to assess the publications that applied remote sensing data sources to investigate the changes in forest cover and forest health and tree health in the five Southeastern European countries by searching in Scopus and Google scholar. There is a higher number of studies applied to remote sensing data sources investigating forest cover change (92.4 percent) compared to forest health (6.7 percent) and tree health (0.8 percent) for five countries in Southeastern Europe. There was a disparity of remote sensing data source studies on forest cover change, forest health and tree health amongst five countries. Croatia and Slovenia lead by 68.9 percent and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro by 31.1 percent of publications, according to Scopus and Google scholar. There were found no remote sensing data source studies on forest cover, forest health and tree health including all five countries altogether. A way to move forward is to increase cooperation between researchers, academic organisations and policy-makers amongst the five countries.