Forest Monitoring

Forest Monitoring is a recurring analysis service from mundialis that tracks the condition of forest areas using Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. It is aimed at foresters and farmers, government authorities, environmental scientists and NGOs who need regularly updated forest data, where manual data collection is slow, inaccurate or hardly possible over large and inaccessible forest areas.

For a customer-defined area of interest, the service automatically downloads Sentinel-2 scenes every quarter, filters them and pre-processes them with cloud masking, atmospheric correction and temporal aggregation. It then calculates vegetation indices such as NDVI and EVI, derives zonal statistics (median values) for the customer's polygons, and detects changes from the time series of these values, producing change maps with 10 m resolution. Results are delivered for download as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) files and/or via Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) or other OGC web services. mundialis tailors the service on request, for example the update frequency, spatial resolution or forest variables. It is also used to plan reforestation measures and to monitor environmental disasters and illegal logging.

The service has been implemented for the Irish forestry authority Coillte, where it automatically detects clear-cutting in forest areas throughout Ireland; mundialis states that cloud cover there currently allows annual rather than quarterly analyses. mundialis is certified to DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 and DIN EN ISO 14001:2015.