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EU constructions tracking system in forests

Long term monitoring of forests is a significant task for national administrations as well as for transboundary relevant agencies and thus, important steps have been made over decades of research and operationalisation of using satellite imagery to address this requirement. Thus, in the context of Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure, the team, together with the stakeholders, have defined a new experimental proof of concept, an interesting and useful addition to the typical EO-based products: vegetation vigour. 

The EO-based product does not represent a snapshot of the vegetation, but it characterises its cumulative state over time. The vegetation vigour is of qualitative nature, meaning that it does not provide a hardline class segmentation, but it highlights regions of increased or decreased vigour, thus emphasising on the health tendency of the vegetation under analysis, that it is ultimately decided by the user.

What is the challenge?

Although NRT alarms of potential deforestations represent an important part of forest monitoring across the world, another important aspect is related to long term monitoring of the vegetation’s health, where the Earth Observation based product vegetation vigour evolution can offer useful insights for responsible agencies.

Our solution

The vegetative vigour (VV) product is a custom type of pixel-based index that characterises the vegetation during long periods of time, preferably during a complete phenological cycle, based on NDVI values.

The algorithm is based on a Machine Learning approach and it uses all spectral bands of S2 L2A to train the pixels within the designated forest class.  The algorithm then approximates the value of the cumulative area of the subgraph of the NDVI evolution over one phenological cycle (one year, in this case) for each pixel, using a custom AI fuzzy analysis.  For each pixel, the VV is proportionally higher as the NDVI values are higher, over the entire analysed period. Thus, the VV can be used to qualitatively compare regions of classes of vegetation, over multiple phenological cycles. 

The main product is the evolution of vegetative vigour, obtained by comparison between 2 consecutive analysed periods (in this case, per year) of vegetative vigour. The product shows the qualitative changes, highlighting regions of increased or decreased vegetative vigour, that can be further analyzed and categorised  by forestry specialists.

Who will benefit?

The use case has two stakeholders, UN-Spider and the University of Transilvania, Faculty of Forestry that have shown interest in the results of the forestry vegetation vigour product.

Target Partner Organizations
OEMC Leading Partner
Get in touch!

Codrina Ilie
Terrasigna
codrina.ilie@terrasigna.com

Type of output

Integrated to tool to visualize and perform basic functionalities such as statistics, map printing

Technology readiness level

TRL3: Experimental proof of concept

Location

Europe

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