Forest disturbances in Europe mapped at high spatial detail and in near-real-time: Logging in protected Estonian forests

Data description

These datasets were generated for the Geostory "Forest disturbances in Europe mapped at high spatial detail and in near-real-time: Logging in protected Estonian forests" in the context of the Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure project.

We used open source high-resolution Sentinel-1 satellite data to develop a wall-to-wall map of forest disturbances in the four-year period between the start of 2020 and end of 2023 in Estonia. First results are presented. The methodology is based on RADD-alerts developed for the pan-tropics (Reiche et al. 2021). Three years (2017-2019) of imagery was used as a historical period, and detections were generated for ~4 years (2020-2023). Winter images from November through March were not included as frozen conditions can introduce false detections. This will be addressed in the next version. Disclaimer: Disturbance maps have not been validated.

Two additional layers are provided for visualization: a forest baseline layer (forestcover), masking out non-forest disturbance detections, was derived from Copernicus 10m 2018 forest cover density and GLAD 30m 2019 tree removal datasets, and a protected areas layer (natura), which displays the extent of Natura 2000 coverage in Estonia.

'.SLD' files are provided for visualization (note: the disturbance .SLC file must be adjusted to contain appropriate time reference fields).

Naming Convention

To ensure consistency and ease of use across and within the projects, we follow the standard Open-Earth-Monitor file-naming convention. The convention works with 10 fields that describes important properties of the data. In this way users can search files, prepare data analysis etc, without needing to open files. For instance:

disturbance_radd_c_10m_s_20200101_20200131_eu_epsg.3035_v20240222.tif

with the following fields:

Generic variable name: disturbance

Variable procedure combination i.e. method standard: radd

Position in the probability distribution / variable type: c

Spatial support: 10m

Depth reference or depth interval e.g. below ("b"), above ("a") ground or at surface ("s"): s

Time reference begin time (YYYYMMDD): 20200101

Time reference end time: 20200131

Bounding box (2 letters max): eu

EPSG code: epsg.3035

Version code i.e. creation date: v20240222

Source Data

Disturbance maps:

Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2017-2023] and Generated using European Union's EEA-10 Copernicus DEM; https://doi.org/10.5270/ESA-c5d3d65

Forest baseline:

Generated using European Union's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service information; https://doi.org/10.2909/486f77da-d605-423e-93a9-680760ab6791 and GLAD tree removal; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2023.113797

Natura 2000: 

Generated using European Environmental Agency's Natura 2000 layers; https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/data/dae737fd-7ee1-4b0a-9eb7-1954eec00c65