Satellites for Wilderness Inspection and Forest Threat Tracking

Project Information

SWIFTT

Grant agreement ID: 101082732

DOI

10.3030/101082732

Project closed

EC signature date 18 October 2022

Start date 1 November 2022

End date 30 April 2026

Funded under

• Digital, Industry and Space

Total cost

€ 3 680 231,26

EU contribution

€ 2 853 249,00

Coordinated by

AXA CLIMATE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SWIFTT (Satellites for Wilderness Inspection and Forest Threat Tracking)

Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Despite being highly resilient to long-term changes in environmental conditions, forests are vulnerable to sudden changes, such as insect outbreaks, wildfires, and windthrow, i.e. the uprooting of a tree caused by the wind. Those risks are intensified by climate change: insects breed more frequently, more dry fuel for wildfires becomes available, and the frequency and severity for large storms increase. As a result, countless habitats are lost, and CO2 sequestered yearly decreases by over 4850M tons.
However, with early and appropriate action, risks can be contained, and the economic and ecological damage can be reduced. SWIFTT will provide forest managers with affordable, simple and effective remote sensing tools backed up by powerful machine learning models. Our solution will offer a holistic health monitoring service using satellite imagery to detect and map the various risks to which forests and their managers are exposed.
Once completed, SWIFTT’s maps detailing areas of windthrow damage, insect outbreaks, and fire risk will enable forest managers to act very quickly and allocate resources efficiently for a timely intervention. With SWIFTT’s sustainable, effective, and low-cost forest management tools, Europe will be better positioned to combat climate change and preserve its biodiversity through healthier forests.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first 18 months have been focused on models and tool development.
Work Package 1 : Model develpment an improvement. In particular, the following tasks have been performed:
- Set up modeling infrastructure on AWS (Understanding of the developed models and their requirements, Implementing the pipeline used to generate the data, Release and test, Set up architecture for processing collected field data sync with Timbtrack)
- Create high fidelity, up-to-date forest basemap & masks (SRI) that are displayed here : https://ee-swiftt.projects.earthengine.app/view/foresttype
Publication : Salii, Y., Kuzin, V., Hohol, A., Kussul, N., & Yailymova, H. (2023, July). Machine learning models and technology for classification of forest on satellite data. In IEEE EUROCON, https://doi.org/10.1109/EUROCON56442.2023.10199006.
- Several data science models have been trained:
For insect outbreak : Identification and collection of benchmark ground-truth maps of insect outbreak (Republic Czech, September 2020 by DEFID2, Southeast of France, October 2018 by SERTIT) ; Exploration on the achievements of spectral data engineering, spectral-vegetation indexes, multi-sensor (Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) data, time-series data ; Training and evaluation of the accuracy performance of pixel-wise classification algorithms (Random Forest, XGBoost, SVM, MLP) and U-Net-based architectures (with attention, self-distillation, data fusion) ; Performing a preliminary analysis of the temporal transferability of the best trained models
For windthrow : Literature review (GLAD Alerts, GLAD-S2 Alerts, RADD Alerts) ; Experiments with SAR on Australian windthrows ; Exploration of SAR processing methods ; Set up of the first model with temporal SAR and anomaly detection.
For wildfire : 3 different machine learning and deep learning models were tested for fire risk prediction applied to forest assets. The Ignition prediction is tested with data gathered from Spain, the weather forescast data were tested from Italy.

Work Package 2 : Data Standardisation, Integration and Verification. In particular, the following tasks have been performed:
In addition, the infrastructure work has been prepared on the web and mobile platform to create a shared data lake. At specific intervals, a synchronization process is initiated to transfer data from the Timbtrack Database to the Shared Database. This ensures that the shared database contains both the real-time and historical data required by the AI models. The Wildsense API accesses the historical data stored in the Shared Data Database to perform model training and analysis.
- SWIFTT utilizes Google Cloud for secure online hosting of its database, ensuring confidentiality and integrity.
- Employing Sequelize ORM simplifies database operations and enables efficient creation of tables and relationships.
- MySQL 8.0 is chosen for storing historical data crucial for AI model training. Its efficient indexing and querying, along with ACID compliance, ensure data integrity.
- The integration of MySQL, Sequelize, and Google Cloud provides a robust infrastructure for AI model learning, enhancing risk detection and decision-making capabilities.

In addition, a Forest damage dataset has been created for Ukraine on forest fires and bark beetle (excluding sanitary cutting and result of war).
Publications: H. Yailymova, B. Yailymov, Y. Salii, V. Kuzin, A. Odruzhenko, S. Sydorenko, A. Shelestov, N. Kussul. A Multimodal Dataset for Forest Damage Detection and Machine Learning 2024 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2024) (accepted).

WP3: Testing and Feedback
- the field partners have been trained in data collection standards
- A first data protocole was created, then a second version has been updated
- First data collection happened in Riga and Ukraine forest

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The forest basemap displays high accuracy on broadleaved, coniferous and mixed woodland, that has been created which allows:
- Can be used to improve the disturbances models, give more information about the forest changes, composition, vulnerability and damages by forest types
- For instance, provide much higher accuracy on change detection in a conifer woodland from a wind storm in winter
- Use 2022 data when the most recent previous map was with 2018 data, with a 10 m resolution for Europe
- Propose a similar accuracy as Copernicus, but as it is based on sentinel 1 and sentinel 2, with a much better temporal resolution (at least yearly vs 3-years return)

In addition of the first results, a first version of the web and mobile app has been made available

sri-high-fidelity-forest-map-zoomed.png

sri-high-fidelity-forest-map.png