Publication: Semi-Supervised Forest Type Mapping in Europe on Satellite Data

21 December 2023

Copernicus is the European Union’s Earth observation programme, which monitors our planet and its environment. The programme is served by a set of dedicated satellites (the Sentinel family) and contributing missions that provide vast amounts of data which are freely accessible to anyone, including service providers, public authorities and international organisations to improve the quality of life for citizens of Europe and around the world.

This information supports several applications in several non-space domains. In the forestry industry, for example, observation data is used to provide forest mapping and forest change mapping, supporting the completion of national forest inventories.

However, an analysis of existing global forest cover maps produced recently shows that the last map with a division into forest types (deciduous and coniferous) and 10-metre spatial resolution was created in 2018. Since forest health monitoring requires recent maps, it is important to be able to create and update European forest maps for the current year in a cost-effective manner.

In a work presented at the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), Dortmund, Germany, in 2023, SWIFTT partners from the Space Research Institute of Ukraine and collaborators describe the results of a forest map created in the context of the SWIFTT project for the European territory based on 2022 Corpernicus’ Sentinel-1 and 2 satellite data with 10-metre spatial resolution with division into types of forests.

The resulting map created in this work will be a reliable source of information for further analysis, management, decision-making, as well as assessment and prevention of land degradation.

Source: N. Kussul, A. Shelestov, B. Yailymov and H. Yailymova, "Semi-Supervised Forest Type Mapping in Europe on Satellite Data," 2023 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), Dortmund, Germany, 2023, pp. 454-458, DOI: 10.1109/IDAACS58523.2023.10348948