Capacity for Copernicus REDD+ and

Forest Monitoring Services

Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts (BAYTS)

Martin Herold – Wageningen University

REDDCopernicus Regional Online Workshop – Learning Exercises

Sep – Nov 2020

Supported by: Partners:

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2018-2020 Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space, Coordinated
Support Action under Grant Agreement No 821880.
 Outline

• Overview: Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts

• Use cases for near-real time (NRT) alerts
• Examples of results in C-Africa, Insular SE Asia, and
Brazil
• Accuracy assessments
• Comparison to other available products
• Future and potential adaptations
• Conclusions

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 Overview

• Near real time alerting / early warning:

– Important for decision makers where a fast response is needed
i.e. information on illegal logging, and for monitoring in logging
concessions under Zero Deforestation and Sustainable Supply
Chain conditions.
– Parameters can be adjusted => focus on fast alerts, or alerts
which show certain deforestation
– Own forest mask can be applied
• About this method
– Free and open data and method => transparency
– Uses the “bayts” approach to combine input data
(https://github.com/jreiche/bayts)

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 Example

Time laps 2014 - 18

Example: Siak, Riau (Indonesia)

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 Use cases

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 Use cases

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts: data

• Uses S1 C-Band radar

– S1 A & B duel-polarization (VH, HH)
– Dense and regular data every 6 – 12 days, 10 m resolution,
open and globally
– Cloud penetrating
– Limitations of C-band: environmental effects (e.g. rain), lower
penetration than L-band

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
methods
• Step 0: Standard SAR pre-
processing incl. multi-temporal
filtering (Quegan & Yu 2001)
• Step 1: Removing forest
seasonality using harmonic
model fitting (A and B)
• Step 2: Data-driven
probabilistic machine learning
approach for near real-time
change detection (D)
(Reiche et al, 2015 | 2018)

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
methods
• Environmental effects and change processes
• Homogenous and stable backscatter at forest
• Spikes at non-forest conditions due to sudden moisture increase
(rain)
• (exceptional) Temporary increase of backscatter from laying
trees after forest disturbance
• Rapid backscatter signal recovery

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
results
• Temporal coverage:
– 1 Jan 2019 – beginning September 2020
• Forest mask:
– 50% canopy cover threshold, and forest losses 2000-2018
removed, (Hansen et al, 2013 data on Global Forest Watch), and
Collection 2 Copernicus Global Land Cover dataset evergreen
forest layer used to exclude dry tropical forests
• Legend:
– ‘Flag’ for unconfirmed changes
– ‘Alerts’ show confirmed changes
– Julian date shows day of year and year (i.e. 19365, is 31
December 2019)
– Forest mask

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Example, Insular SE Asia

Subset of Radar Forest

Cover Loss Alerts in a
site in Insular SE Asia,
showing flags (in orange)
where forest disturbance
is suspected in a pixel,
and alerts (in red), where
the disturbance is
confirmed

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Example, Insular SE Asia

Subset of Radar Forest

Cover Loss Alerts in a
site in Insular SE Asia,
showing flags (in orange)
where forest disturbance
is suspected in a pixel,
and alerts (in red), where
the disturbance is
confirmed (Centre
coordinates 117.27,
2.27).

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Example, Central Africa

Subset of Radar Forest

Cover Loss Alerts in a site
in Central Africa, showing
flags (in orange) where
forest disturbance is
suspected in a pixel, and
alerts (in red), where the
disturbance is confirmed.
(centre coordinates 15.65,
1.55)

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Example, Brazil

Subset of Radar Forest

Cover Loss Alerts in a
site in Brazil, showing
flags (in orange) where
forest disturbance is
suspected in a pixel, and
alerts (in red), where the
disturbance is confirmed
(Centre coordinates
54.15, 10.93).

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Accuracy assessment methods
• Can assess thematic and temporal accuracy
• Sampling design
– Stratified random sampling (Olofsson et al., 2014; RSE)
• Response design
– Deriving reference date from satellite time series itself
– Estimating uncertainty of reference data

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Accuracy assessments
• Spatial and
temporal detection
accuracy: example
of Riau province,
Indonesia
– UA and PA of ~95%
– Mean time lag: 22
days (natural forest)
– Mean time lag: 15
days (plantation
forest)

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
method adaptations for timely alerts
• Trade-off between spatial and temporal detection
accuracy (confident vs. timely alerting)
• User needs define method tuning

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Comparison with other products
• GLAD alerts (http://glad-forest-alert.appspot.com/)
– ETM + and OLI sensors - optical data from Landsat
• MODIS based alerts in Brazil
– Coarse spatial resolution (250 m)
• Other national systems, i.e. Peru
– https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ab4ec3
– Landsat data

Indonesia
since 2017
Peru
since 2016

Ethiopia
since 2012

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 Potential systems: Alert-driven
Interactive Forest Monitoring https://weblog.wur.eu/spotlight/sustainable-
palm-oil-through-deforestation-
alerts/?_ga=2.88513307.1836173873.159851626
3-553581659.1593680482

Remote Sensing https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-

Near-real time forest change Results/Research-Institutes/Environmental-
Research/show-wenr/Palm-oil-industry-to-
alerting system jointly-develop-radar-monitoring-to-detect-
deforestation.htm?_ga=2.153402296.18361738
73.1598516263-553581659.1593680482

Forest change alerts

• Geolocation
• Area of change
• Estimated time
• Confidence Deforestation /
Degradation alerts
• Geolocation
• Area of change
• Estimated time
• Drivers
• Activities Open-source
public WebGIS

On the ground forest monitoring

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 Radar Forest Cover Loss Alerts:
Conclusions
• Improving alerts using Sentinel data
– Sentinel-1 as game changer in the tropics
– Multi-sensor approaches (optical + radar) can improve timeliness
– Understand uncertainties
– Open source solutions exist, emerging operational delivery towards
pantropical scales
• Making near real-time alerting actionable
– Alert-driven interactive forest monitoring
– Alert characterisation and understanding land management
– Moving from “where & when” to “why & what” (data to action)
• Alerting is about transparency
– Published and open-source software tools
– Free and open data and tools are essential for success

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 Acknowledgements and key
references
• J. Reiche and B. Slagter
• Wageningen University and Satelligence
• https://github.com/jreiche/bayts
• Reiche, J., Hamunyela, E., Verbesselt, J., Hoekman, D.H., and Herold, M.
(2018a) Improving near-real time deforestation monitoring in tropical dry
forests by combining dense Sentinel-1 time series with Landsat and ALOS-2
PALSAR-2. Remote Sensing of Environment 2018(204):147-161. DOI:
10.1016/j.rse.2017.10.034
• Reiche, J., Verhoeven, R., Verbesselt, J., Hamunyela, E., Wielaard, N., and
Herold, M. (2018b) Characterizing Tropical Forest Cover Loss Using Dense
Sentinel-1 Data and Active Fire Alerts. Remote Sensing 10(5) DOI:
10.3390/rs10050777

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 Thank you for your attention

www.reddcopernicus.info

Contact: forestry@gaf.de

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