Forest map and its uncertainty as an important input for carbon sink estimation for Poland and Ukraine

Improving knowledge on the land cover and forest ecosystems is of a high importance for carrying out spatial inventories of emissions and removals in forestry as the best way to achieve reliable results of forest carbon account. The region of the study is the territory of Poland and Ukraine, covering a substantial part of European diversity of natural landscapes. In addition, Ukraine and Poland have a high potential to sequester carbon through afforestation. The accuracy of available forest maps varies considerably over space. We have applied the method of geographically weighted regression to generate a hybrid forest map for Poland and Ukraine. This method predicts land cover types based on crowdsourced data obtained from the Geo- Wiki project, and land cover/forest cover products derived from remote sensing. The hybrid forest cover was found to be more accurate than the individual forest maps extracted from global remote sensing land cover products.