RETURN - Monitoring tropical forest recovery capacity using RADAR Sentinel satellite data

Demonstrating the potential of European Sentinel satellite data

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. There is as such 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. The reasons for this are twofold:

  1. These methods require expert knowledge and are very compute intensive 2) They cannot be easily scaled over large amounts of satellite data

This proposal addresses these two critical bottlenecks by:

1)  Exploring innovative solutions for automated parameter optimization2)  Making use of high-performance and distributed computing to dramatically reduce the practical runtimes for the involved methods

By adapting and combining these innovative technologies, we intend to measure forest recovery capacity at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales using the new RADAR Sentinel-1 satellite data. By making data and algorithms more accessible and scalable, this project addresses an urgent need of Dutch service providers and will demonstrate the potential of European Sentinel satellite data for large-scale monitoring tropical forests.

Participating organisations

Environment & Sustainability
Environment & Sustainability
Netherlands eScience Center
University of Copenhagen
Wageningen University & Research

Impact

Output

Team

JV
J. Verbesselt
Principal investigator
Wageningen University and Research
Niels  Drost
Niels Drost
Programme Manager
Netherlands eScience Center
Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez
Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez
eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center

Related projects

Scaling up pangenomics for plant breeding

Delivering a pangenome approach that drastically improves the analytical power on plant data

Updated 4 months ago
Finished

A new perspective on global vegetation water dynamics from radar satellite data

Global vegetation water dynamics using radar satellite data

Updated 4 months ago
Finished

Remote sensing of damage feedbacks and ice shelf instability in Antarctica

Using remote sensing to develop damage indicators across all Antarctic ice shelves

Updated 19 months ago
Finished

Digital twins: monitoring ships’ state in real-time

Advanced data science to assist the design of cleaner, safer and smarter ships

Updated 11 months ago
Finished

Data mining tools for abrupt climate change

Updating our knowledge on abrupt climate change

Updated 18 months ago
Finished

eEcoLiDAR

eScience infrastructure for ecological applications of LiDAR point clouds

Updated 22 months ago
Finished

BirdRadar

A novel filtering method to estimate bird densities

Updated 22 months ago
Finished

Towards a species-by-species approach to global biodiversity modelling

The current decline of global biodiversity

Updated 18 months ago
Finished

Related software

BenchmarkRecovery

BE

This project simulates Landsat data and evaluates the performance of recovery indicators with respect to data and disturbance characteristics.

Updated 27 months ago
1 2