Monitoring report of old growth forest changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for July 2022

Category: Press releases
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Data: 02.08.22
Monitoring report of old growth forest changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for July 2022

In July, the expert of "ForestCom" NGO Oleg Chaskovskyi continued to monitor officially recognized and state protected old growth forest areas based on Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 satellite images. The composite of the 21st optical image of Sentinel-2 turned out to be the most suitable for monitoring (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Composite of Sentinel-2 satellite images for July on the monitoring territory of particularly valuable areas.


To analyze the changes in the forest cover on the territory of old growth forests, a raster layer for the vegetation index NDVI was calculated. A total of 21 Sentinel-2 images were used to calculate the normalized vegetation index NDVI. The computed image was exported to QGIS to calculate statistics for each plot.


The NDVI index layer calculated in Google Engine Earth is exported as an image for further analysis in the QGIS environment (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Fragment of the NDVI index image with combined areas of ancient plantations.


For each area of ancient plantations using the "Zonal statistics" module in QGIS, the value of the index, which is repeated most often (majority). Areas with low index values up to 0.3 were not detected.


1,099 plots with an area of 12,120.1 ha have been identified for monitoring, which is 70.1% of the total number of accepted old growth forest. As a result of such an analysis, no changes were detected.


Previous reports on satellite monitoring of old growth forests:

Monitoring report of old growth forests changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for June 2022
Monitoring report of old growth forests changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for May 2022
Monitoring report of old growth forests changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for February-March 2022
Monitoring report of old growth forests changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for December 2022
Monitoring report of old growth forests changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for January 2022