Scientific Writing, March 7. A project led by the European Space Agency (ESA) processed billions of radar images of the entire Amazon basin and found, between January 2017 and November 2021, a forest loss of more than 5.2 million hectares , roughly the size of Costa Rica. .
The project is called “Sentinel-1 for Science: Amazonas” and, as ESA warns, forest ecosystems are rapidly experiencing the effects of climate change, making it increasingly urgent to carry out forest monitoring in timely.
Forests play an important role in offsetting anthropogenic emissions of fossil fuels. Since 2015, the world’s tropical forests can be observed regularly with an unprecedented interval of 6 to 12 days thanks to the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, specifies the ESA in a press release.
Millions of gigabytes of radar data are acquired day and night, regardless of cloud cover, haze, smoke or aerosols, allowing monitoring of deforestation and forest degradation at least every two weeks .
The challenge, however, is to find appropriate methods to extract meaningful indicators of forest loss from the huge amounts of incoming radar data, so that anomalies in the time series can be detected regularly and consistently across tropical forest datasets.
The Sentinel-1 for Science: Amazonas project presents a simple and transparent method of using radar imagery from the Sentinel-1 satellite to estimate forest loss.
The project uses a spatial-temporal data cube design, also known as StatCubes -it is a method of multidimensional and temporal analysis of large amounts of data-.
With this approach, a dynamic analysis of deforestation in the Amazon Basin is created.
The team was able to detect a forest loss of more than 5.2 million hectares between 2017 and 2021, roughly the size of Costa Rica.
Gisat remote sensing expert Neha Hunka commented: “What we see from space is that more than a million hectares of tropical rainforests are disappearing every year in the Amazon Basin, with 2021 being the worst. year in Brazil”.
“We are able to transparently and consistently track and report these losses every 12 days from now.”