Monitoring report of old growth forests changes in the Ukrainian Carpathians for December 2022

In December, our experts continued monitoring old growth forests based on Sentinel satellite images.

ForestCom experts continued to monitor old-growth forests. Optical satellite images of Sentinel-2 were used for the investigation. A composite of 24 Sentinel-2 optical images was suitable for monitoring

 Fig.1 Areas of old-growth forests monitored by ForestCom in the Ukrainian Carpathians on the compositions of Santinel-2 satellite images in December 2022. Particularly valuable areas are marked in red.

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. 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 A fragment of the vegetation index NDVI image with combined plots of old-growth forests monitored by ForestCom in the Ukrainian Carpathians in December 2022

For each area of particularly valuable plantations, using the “Zonal statistics” module in QGIS, the value of the index is repeated most often (majority). Areas with low index values of up to 0.3 were visually inspected. The reason for such a low index value was the areas of residual cloudiness and not tree cover loss.

For the remaining part of the studied territory, not covered by Sentinel-2 optical images, a visual analysis of the state of the forest cover was carried out based on Sentinel-1 radar images (Fig. 3).

Fig.3. Areas of old-growth forests monitored by ForestCom in the Ukrainian Carpathians (red color) on the synthetic radar (Sentinel 1) image in December 2022.

The monitoring was carried out as accurately as the resolution of satellite images allows, that is, selective logging of low intensity cannot be determined with the help of such information. Based on the analysis, during the reported period no violations of the forest cover were detected in the inspected areas.

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