Audit Forest Roads Using A Combination of Methods

Gravel roads are the main forest and rural road network. Audit them is a yearly issue for the Greek Forest Service Offices and for Agriculture Service. To evaluate gravel road conditions with various conditions, surface materials and geometric features was the main task of this research. A well maintained and improved forest road can provide successful transportation to the forest and non-forest products by minimizing the possibility of reducing the product quality. In this study demonstrated the ability of combined methods such as: field forest road ride quality estimation, classification the ride quality per 100meter, set the standards for each ride quality classification, road segment condition monitoring, from very high-resolution multispectral satellite images using innovative semantic segmentation and classification based on deep learning, additional data collection by UAVs equipped with RGB cameras that can also provide accurate DSM information, manual inspection or other free sources. Since in most cases, such detection and monitoring procedures require manual and tedious procedures, the INFOROAD project (https://inforoad.karteco.gr/) (Project code: KMP6-0079153), implemented under the framework of the Action “Investment Plans of Innovation” of the Operational Program “Central Macedonia 2014 2020”, that is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund and Greece”, is developing an innovative methodology and tools for automated extraction, mapping and status monitoring of forest and rural road network, by combining remote sensing data with state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. Since only few data sets exists for forest and agricultural roads because of they are gravel roads that makes the research more challenging. Case-study area is chosen the peri-urban forest and rural area of Thessaloniki, which will be associating the needed dataset for the pilot application and will be produced for open access use in order to boost similar researches on the field. The stakeholders such as forest and agriculture authorities, wood and farming enterprises, etc. are the pillar of public and workers opinion about the necessity of that kind of tool such as INFOROAD project which will be performed by an online WebGIS - Geographical Information System platform. The expected impact of the research is to expand INFOROAD project, throughout the forestry and agricultural community, as its use will reduce resources for continuous inspection of road axes only from the field, while increasing the quality of the products that will use it the gravel road.