The good and the bad of satellite data for forest monitoring

26 Outubro 2018, 14:30 • Catia Luisa Santana Calisto Pesquita

Title:

The good and the bad of satellite data for forest monitoring

Abstract:

Forests constitute one of the major natural resources of Earth, and their destruction greatly contributes to global warming. Financing mechanisms such as REDD+ (www.un-redd.org) promote sustainable forest management while supporting economic development, but they require that forest monitoring be applied at national and local level. Remote Sensing (RS) satellite-based approaches are the most practical option for monitoring forests.

Relying on the big data repositories of optical and radar imagery from Copernicus (www.copernicus.eu), and the open-access cloud computing of Google Earth Engine (earthengine.google.com), my scientific challenge for the next 6 years is to develop robust algorithms that can learn the spatiotemporal relationships contained in the dense time-series multi-sensor data, in order to allow i) the production of enriched land cover maps, ii) the early detection of forest degradation, and iii) the monitoring of forest fires.

With this workplan in mind, I will take you on a tour through the good and the bad of satellite data, describing its format and meaning, how to use it for forest monitoring, related technical and human difficulties, and some pitfalls to avoid.


Bio:

Sara Silva is a principal investigator of BioISI (BioSystems and Integrative Sciences Institute) in FCUL. Her main research interests are nature-inspired machine learning methods, in particular Genetic Programming (GP), which she has applied in several interdisciplinary projects from remote sensing and forest science to epidemiology and medical informatics. Sara Silva obtained her PhD (2008) from the University of Coimbra. She is the creator and developer of GPLAB (A Genetic Programming Toolbox for MATLAB) since 2003, and a member of the editorial board of the GPEM (Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines) journal since 2009. In 2015 she was Editor-in-Chief of the largest conference in Evolutionary Computation (GECCO) and in 2018 she received the "EvoStar Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe".