Monitoring report of particularly valuable forests in the Ukrainian Carpathians for August 2022

In August, NGO ForestCom experts continued monitoring particularly valuable forest areas based on Sentinel-2 satellite images. During August, we managed to select 18 images for the calculation of the vegetation index.

To analyze changes in the forest cover in particularly valuable areas of the forest, experts calculated the vegetation index. this information was exported for further analysis in the QGIS environment. For monitoring, 1,099 plots with an area of 12,120.1 hectares were identified, which is 70.1% of the total number of accepted primeval forests. Experts note that areas with low index values of up to 0.3 were visually inspected. They believe that the reason for such a low value of the index was the areas of residual cloudiness, and not the loss of tree cover.

Fig. 2. Fragment of the image of the NDVI index with combined areas of particularly valuable plantations for August 2022.

Monitoring was carried out as accurately as the resolution of satellite images allows. And therefore, individual logging of low intensity cannot be seen in these pictures.

After conducting this analysis, the experts of the ForestCom NGO did not find any violations of the forest cover.

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