A Deep Dive Into Forest Health Monitoring Using Daily Satellite Imagery to Detect Early Threats

Government agencies managing vast forests can now leverage satellite imagery to monitor forest health more effectively, overcoming traditional challenges like limited resources and personnel.

Government agencies responsible for developing and implementing strategies to protect and restore forested lands face a difficult task. With areas often exceeding millions of acreage, there simply isn’t enough personnel, funds, or time to regularly monitor, detect, or measure change efficiently or effectively. 

However, always-on, up-to-date data derived from satellite imagery offers government agencies the advanced capability for forest health monitoring over broad and remote areas. Rather than reactionary responses or infrequent, costly aerial photos, satellite imagery empowers civil agencies to increase the efficiency of pest and disease monitoring, fuels reduction and treatment, and forest restoration work.

We’ll explore how government agencies can draw on historical satellite data, receive new imagery daily, and task high-resolution imagery to detect early threats and support conservation efforts of our forests.

The Importance of Forest Health Monitoring

Governments around the globe rely on forest health monitoring to support stewardship and legislative initiatives. This practice involves carefully managing and reporting on these initiatives, watching for any new or worsening threats, and responding as needed.

Forest health monitoring includes responsibilities such as:

• Conducting biological, physical, and social scientific research and developing beneficial applications from it
  
  
• Ensuring agroforestry practices (i.e., combined forestry and agriculture) help keep farms and woodlands productive and profitable without threatening ecological balance or encroaching into protected spaces
  
  
• Monitoring invasive species, illegal logging, trespassing, and other legal or regulatory compliance violations committed by individuals or commercial entities

Early Threat Detection

For fairly obvious reasons, proactive forest health monitoring proves crucial for effective protection and mitigation. The longer a threat goes unnoticed, the more difficult management and remediation efforts become — especially in remote and vast environments. 

Take wildfires. Some governments, like the Government of Canada, have adopted forest management strategies to improve mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery practices. Combining satellite data with other geospatial, weather, and behavioral indices help the government map burned areas, monitor fire risk, and model carbon emission estimates.

Why Is Traditional Forest Health Monitoring So Difficult?

Simply put, there’s too much forest to effectively or efficiently monitor all the acreage (even when there aren’t enough forests). For example, consider the following areas some countries must manage:

• The U.S. federal government and collective state governments monitor over 321 million acres (130 million hectares) of forests across public lands.
  
  
• Canada contains around 815 million acres (330 million hectares) of public forests. 
  
  
• The European Union (EU) collectively controls roughly 160 million acres (65 million hectares) of publicly owned forests.
  
  
• Brazil’s public forests—largely bolstered by the Amazon Rainforest—almost match Canada’s, with 808 million acres (327 million hectares).

Regardless of how many regional agencies, branch offices, personnel, and other resources the government has at its disposal for forest health monitoring, the fact remains that they can’t be everywhere at once. More importantly, these agencies traditionally couldn’t gain the reliable visibility necessary to mitigate this disparity between capabilities and scope.

Improving Forest Health Monitoring With Broad Area Management

Regularly viewing and analyzing near-real-time ground truth compiled from satellite imagery provides reliable early warning indicators. Applying broad area management practices not only improves visibility but also reduces costs and accelerates decision-making capabilities.  

Broad area management is the practice of monitoring, detecting, and measuring change over large land areas. Planet offers broad area management with:

• Global, Daily Monitoring: 3.7 meter resolution images in four multispectral bands; RGB and Near Infrared collected over 300 million square kilometers each day. 
  
  
• High-Resolution Imagery: Enhanced 50 cm ortho spatial resolution images delivered less than three hours from capture.
   
• Automated Change Detection and Alerts: Timely alerts when new roads are cut into forests or new buildings emerge.
  
  
• Derived Data Products: Forest carbon datasets and automated field boundary detection. 

These capabilities enable government agencies and commercial entities to monitor:

• Forest inventory and estimated logging capacity
• Newly planted areas for reforestation and the clearfell regions after harvesting
• Forest disease detection
• Pests
• Invasive species
• Trespassers
• Disasters like wildfires
• The long-term impacts of climate change
• Tree growth encroaching on power lines or other dangers

Whether the geospatial analysis focused on these threats prompts immediate response or continued monitoring, government agencies gain the visibility needed to make the right decision. Satellite imagery supports all monitoring and response activities—from fighting wildfires to writing new public policies that help prevent them.

Conservation: Practices and Policies

Brazil’s Federal Police began utilizing satellite imagery to monitor the Amazon Rainforest in pursuit of environmental protections, potential trespassers and wildfire culprits, a low-carbon economy, and forest conservation.

In 2021, Brazil’s government passed a new proposal—Regulate the National Policy of Payment for Environmental Services. The document outlines law enforcement’s environmental monitoring responsibilities, inclusive policy goals for all stakeholders, minimal payment criteria to establish safeguards, and reasonable incentives for commercial entities. This policy’s creation and future enforcement will depend on augmenting forest health monitoring via satellite imagery.

Pest and Disease Detection Case Study

In the Czech Republic, summers affected by climate change caused the bark beetle population to rapidly increase in the dry heat, causing the forest ecosystem to fall out of balance. The insects devastated Czech conifer forests, impacting 18 million m³ and putting 80% of the spruce growth at risk.

By leveraging Planet surface reflectance basemaps, the Czech Forest Management Institute (FMI) collaborated with various stakeholders to rapidly determine the affected areas, which covered 16,000 hectares (valued at €200 million). Additional assessments helped inform landowners of the severe impacts, with one out of every five unaware that forests on their property were affected.

As Peter Lukeš, a remote sensing scientist at FMI, stated, they can now mitigate the damage and provide data to the “Ministry of Agriculture so they can discern affected areas and decide where finances should be allocated for reforestation going forward.”

If FMI had not leveraged satellite imagery (and basemaps), they may not have discovered the full extent of the bark beetle’s damage. This would have caused the problem to persist if any affected forests or trees were overlooked and created a resurgence. Given the unpredictability of climate change’s effects, as seen via the beetle population boom, increased visibility and monitoring are paramount.

Tools and Techniques for Forest Health Monitoring

GIS platforms provide the best tools for accessing, analyzing, and visualizing satellite imagery. Specifically, Esri’s ArcGIS and the open-source Q-GIS typically receive the highest praise from users.

Data Integration

Depending on which commercial satellite imagery provider organizations partner with, they may access various integration methods. These connect the provided image library to the organization’s GIS implementation (and potentially other software platforms).

For example, organizations partnering with Planet gain access to the following integrations:

• Desktop integrations allow users to search, access, and import Planet imagery within GIS.
  
  
• API integrations allow more technical users to build and configure connections to various resources, streamlining and simplifying data transfer.
  
  
• Planet images can be streamed to any platform that complies with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) WMS or WMTS standards. 

Planet: Leading Future Trends in Forest Health Monitoring

Although remote sensing technology was not considered until roughly the 1980s, today’s forestry and forest health monitoring professionals leverage it alongside satellite imagery to achieve new levels of visibility and insight. Future trends will likely see continued adoption of satellite imagery and more efforts to incorporate various intelligence sources like drones and LiDAR.

These augmentations to remote sensing and satellite imagery will only help create a more comprehensive understanding, visibility, and more targeted and actionable guidance.

But rather than waiting for the future, Planet has already been busy working toward facilitating sustainable forest management for a decade.

Every day, we’re helping governments and commercial entities—from gradually monitoring reforestation growth over time to receiving prompt notice about trespassers, illegal loggers, and other malicious activity.

Organizations tasked with forest monitoring and inventory management need visibility to be effective. And no one provides visibility like Planet. 

Contact us to learn more.