Monitoring Tropical Forest Recovery Capacity Using RADAR Satellite Images

Recent extreme droughts combined with accelerating human exploitation are pushing tropical forests to the point where they cannot recover, making them vulnerable to large unprecedented wildfires. This causes an urgent need to monitor the recovery capacity of tropical forests.

While time series-based break detection approaches have demonstrated potential to measure tropical forest recovery capacity, they have not yet been applied over large amounts of satellite data.

To address this challenge, the SURF computing infrastructure, i.e., the SPIDER cluster and the Sentinel-1 data cube prepared by the EODC GmbH was used. Those resources were available within the C-SCALE project as a part of a use case defined and designed together with EOSC experts. The provided resources were extremely useful for the RETURN use case. This aims at exploring time series of satellite radar (Sentinel-1) images from the EU Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) Programme to understand the recovery capacity of the Amazon rainforest. The outcomes of the RETURN research are important to help identify areas with slower forest recovery in the Amazon basin and potentially understand their causes.

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