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71 000radar images over Southeast Asia processed on the CNES cluster, covering 1 230 000 km²

Key wordsForest, tropical, deforestation, radar imaging, automatic detection

TropiSCO is making great strides

Published on 06/01/2022
What do Southeast Asia, Africa and Amazonia have in common? The forest and, consequently, the TropiSCO project! This one aims to monitor tropical deforestation worldwide on a weekly basis using satellite radar imagery. Compiling thousands of images, the teams are working hard.
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Deforestation in Asia and the Guiana Shield from 2018 to 2021. Each hexagon covers an area of 460 km2.
Deforestation in Asia and the Guiana Shield from 2018 to 2021. Each hexagon covers an area of 460 km2. © Simon Gascoin, Maylis Duffau et Stéphane Mermoz

The TropiSCO project is therefore being deployed on three continents almost simultaneously. The work is as colossal as the method is clear: to use Sentinel-1 radar images, acquired every 6 to 12 days, to map deforestation areas automatically.

Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia: South East Asia is the territory where the team has made the most progress. By taking over all processing until recently, the team is now entering the automation process.

Production on the Guiana plateau is also well underway and will be completed by the end of January 2022. The team will continue with the first productions in Gabon in the following weeks.

See TropiSCO maps and results

Produced on a national or local scale according to user needs, all deforestation maps will be available via a web-based TropiSCO data dissemination platform. This will allow users to navigate between maps, zoom in, calculate spatio-temporal statistics and download data. When it opens in January/February 2022, this portal will offer results for Southeast Asia and the Guiana Shield, as well as the first demonstrations for Gabon.

As a crucial tool for the future, TropiSCO will undoubtedly contribute to verifying the commitment of the signatory countries to the agreement to halt deforestation, which will be signed at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021.