EO4SD forest management

This product identifies new forest canopy disturbances on a high temporal frequency basis. A Near Real Time (NRT) Forest Monitoring System is continuously running and Earth Observation (EO) data is processed as soon as it is available, meaning that the system is activated and updated by each newly-acquired EO data set. The type of EO sensors used in the processing chain and their individual repeat pass intervals define the possible frequency of updates to the service.

Detected forest disturbances are mapped and provided by a web mapping service (WMS) or ingested into a user-defined database. Forest canopy disturbances are then monitored over time and classified according to their permanence and size as either “deforestation” (permanent and exceeding a minimum size) or “forest degradation” (non-permanent, or below a minimum size).

A NRT system brings the advantage of timely information on the location and intensity of forest canopy disturbances. The sensitivity of such a system can be adapted to the user needs by defining thresholds and the number of consecutive change events for each pixel location before publishing an alert. Usually, NRT systems are more reliable at identifying the place of an observed activity and less on the precise spatial extent of it. For an accurate land cover change assessment EO4SD-FM provides products like Forest Area Change maps or Land Cover Change maps that are delivered with detailed accuracy figures.