Forest Health

Sentinel-2 (MSI) provides global, regular and repeated coverage of inland, coastal and open sea waters under cloud-free sky. One of the many applications of Sentinel-2 data is for the monitoring of Woodland areas.

Woodland ecosystems underpin everything from Spain’s rural economies to Europe’s climate goals: they lock up vast carbon stocks, buffer floods, shelter biodiversity and feed local supply chains—yet they are increasingly strained by pests, drought and illegal logging. Because manual surveys struggle to keep pace, the open-access Copernicus Sentinel fleet has become a game-changer for forest guardians. Optical Sentinel-2 images (10–20 m) can be stacked every five days to flag subtle canopy changes; giving managers an early-warning layer they never had before. Radar-based Sentinel-1 cuts through clouds to deliver weekly “RADD” alerts of selective logging or road building, while its dense time-series feed Europe’s biomass maps that quantify how much carbon each hectare of forest is storing. In combination, Sentinel-1 and -2 can pinpoint clear-cuts down to half a hectare, classify forest types and reveal disturbance fronts, providing the evidence base that policymakers need to enforce Spain’s pest-control, wildfire-risk and timber-legality regulations.

S2 and S1 routinely collect large amounts of images which are made freely available. The vast amounts of data produced by the constellation of satellites are a great opportunity to develop systems for marine ecosystem monitoring in shallow coastal waters. To become fully operational, these processing systems must be entirely automatic with a controlled level of reliability and robustness.