Forest Disturbance Monitoring Using Cloud-Based Sentinel-2 Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning

Molnár, Tamás and Király, Géza (2024) Forest Disturbance Monitoring Using Cloud-Based Sentinel-2 Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning. JOURNAL OF IMAGING, 10 (1). ISSN 2313-433X

Text Forest-Disturbance-Monitoring-Using-CloudBased-Sentinel2-Satellite-Imagery-and-Machine-LearningJournal-of-Imaging.pdf Download (5MB)

Abstract

Forest damage has become more frequent in Hungary in the last decades, and remote sensing offers a powerful tool for monitoring them rapidly and cost-effectively. A combined approach was developed to utilise high-resolution ESA Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine cloud computing and field-based forest inventory data. Maps and charts were derived from vegetation indices (NDVI and Z∙NDVI) of satellite images to detect forest disturbances in the Hungarian study site for the period of 2017–2020. The NDVI maps were classified to reveal forest disturbances, and the cloud-based method successfully showed drought and frost damage in the oak-dominated Nagyerdő forest of Debrecen. Differences in the reactions to damage between tree species were visible on the index maps; therefore, a random forest machine learning classifier was applied to show the spatial distribution of dominant species. An accuracy assessment was accomplished with confusion matrices that compared classified index maps to field-surveyed data, demonstrating 99.1% producer, 71% user, and 71% total accuracies for forest damage and 81.9% for tree species. Based on the results of this study and the resilience of Google Earth Engine, the presented method has the potential to be extended to monitor all of Hungary in a faster, more accurate way using systematically collected field-data, the latest satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence.

Tudományterület / tudományág

agricultural sciences > forestry and wildlife management
engineering and technology

Faculty

Not relevant

Institution

Soproni Egyetem

Item Type:	Article
SWORD Depositor:	Teszt Sword
Depositing User:	Csaba Horváth
Identification Number:	MTMT:34481544
Date Deposited:	11 Mar 2024 09:24
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2024 09:24
URI:	http://publicatio.uni-sopron.hu/id/eprint/3013

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