OEMC project use case: Monitoring forest vegetation vigour evolution over phenological cycles

Description

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 OEMC, 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 informed user.

Stakeholder needs: 

• UN-Spider has activities related to deforestation with an impact on climate and through its mandate, it shares related methodology and solutions with interested UN Member States they are serving at their requests. The vegetation vigour evolution product, based on openly licensed satellite imagery, can be an important and useful addition to the relevant geospatial products that allow institutions, such as the National Ministries of Environment to monitor forest vegetation health. 
• For the Transylvania University of Brasov UniTBv, the use case is important through the educational perspective.

Planned implementation: 

Given the novelty of the proposed EO-based product, the team has decided to test its efficiency on a series of sample regions across Europe, that have been selected with respect to profoundly distinctive environmental characteristics. The 6 sample regions have been chosen to address different forestry ecoregions, including shrubs to test the hypothesis that the new state-of-the art algorithm can be successfully used in regions with highly diverse types of vegetation.

Implementation steps include: 

• Generated an improved auxiliary dataset to extract the forestry vegetation regions across Europe using CLCplus Backbone and the High Resolution Layer Small Woody Features;
• Generate for all 6 defined sample regions in the different European ecoregions, the vegetation vigor for years 2023 and 2024 (and its evolution) using the improved auxiliary dataset;
• Test and discuss the results with the stakeholders, obtaining feedback on the quality and usage of the generated products.

Knowledge Resources

Funding awards

Additional details