Introduction to Forest Change Monitoring

About 4 billion hectares of forest cover remain globally. Increasing global demand for natural resources and more frequent extreme climate events drive global forest loss. Preserving forest cover is vital not only for the global climate but also for the ecosystem services which these forests provide, from provisioning to supporting, and regulating services. Provisioning services include materials from food and water to medicinal resources and timber. Supporting services are what allow the forests to produce the provisioning services, these include recycling, primary production, and soil formation, indirectly providing food, regulating floods, and purifying water. Lastly, regulating services are those which regulate climate, by sequestering carbon, purifying water and air, as well as controlling for pests and disease.

This video from EO-College’s Land in Focus – Forest Ecosystems MOOC, provides an introduction to forest change monitoring, focusing on global forest loss due to deforestation, degradation, and human activities like logging, agriculture, and mining, often illegal in nature. It highlights the critical role of satellite imagery, particularly Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data, for near-real-time forest monitoring and time series analysis to detect changes, study drivers like smallholder agriculture and mining, and aid law enforcement.