Forest Tracker

Indicator: 

• Share of forest area (ESS code: 15_10 )

• Close UN indicator: 15.1.1

Pilot:

Romania: learn more

The Forest Tracker is a fully automated EO-based system that delivers maps of forest loss, degradation, and regeneration based on annual time series of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. By analysing vegetation indices (e.g., NDVI) and temporal trends in spectral reflectance, the system can detect not only complete forest clearing but also subtler forms of degradation due to thinning, disease, or fire. The service is tailored to reflect national forest definitions and regulatory needs. It provides yearly classifications of stable forest, deforested, degraded, or regenerated areas, allowing authorities to track spatial and temporal patterns in forest change. By focusing on a spatially explicit, high-frequency approach, the service enhances situational awareness and provides early warnings for intervention.

Main Features of the Service.

The Forest Tracker is designed to deliver consistent, scalable, and user-oriented forest change information. Using Sentinel-2 Level 2A data, the service applies temporal segmentation techniques to identify abrupt or progressive changes in vegetation cover. The analysis distinguishes between forest loss (complete removal of canopy cover), degradation (partial loss or structural damage), and regeneration (new forest growth or restoration efforts). Key processing steps include:

• Pre-processing of EO imagery (cloud masking, geometric correction, reflectance normalization).
• Derivation of vegetation indices (e.g., NDVI, NBR) and temporal metrics.
• Application of threshold-based classification and change detection algorithms.
• Post-processing and generation of raster and vector layers for mapping forest condition categories.

The outputs are provided through a web-based dashboard that allows users to visualize forest change per year, zoom into specific areas, and extract statistics at municipal or county level. Data can be downloaded as georeferenced rasters (e.g. GeoTiff) for integration into GIS platforms and as stand-alone images (e.g. PNG) for policy reports.

The system architecture is modular and cloud-based, enabling scalability to other regions and transferability to different national contexts.