Publication: Satellite-Based Analysis of Forest Damage in Ukraine’s Protected Areas

13 January 2026

Ukraine’s protected forests face growing threats from military actions, illegal logging, and economic activities, requiring continuous monitoring. Current methods are often complex and resource-intensive, limiting scalability and frequent use.

In this work, SWIFTT partners from the Space Research Institute of Ukraine introduce an innovative satellite-based approach for rapid forest damage detection, providing a scalable, resource-efficient solution with minimal data and computational needs. The authors propose an anomaly detection method using the B4 spectral band in Sentinel-2 imagery, which has been experimentally identified as the most effective for detecting forest damage in Ukraine. Their findings show that the proposed method effectively distinguishes between undamaged and damaged forest areas. They identified significant forest destruction in protected areas of eastern, northern, and southern Ukraine, particularly in regions affected by active hostilities. However, the analysis also uncovered damaged forest areas in the Carpathian region and western Ukraine, suggesting that other factors such as economic activities and illegal logging may also contribute to forest degradation. Overall, by 2024, 249.71 thousand hectares of forest in protected areas had been damaged, accounting for approximately 5.17% of the total protected forest area in Ukraine.

Read the paper in the link below.