Performance Assessment of Recent Tropical Forest Monitoring Products for REDD+ Operational Services

Summary

Recent advances in developing global forest monitoring approaches are important to address the role of tropical forests and the impact of deforestation, on global environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. In order to support the REDD+ monitoring and reporting, this paper assesses and compares recent products derived from Earth Observation at pan tropical scale regarding the forest status for year 2019 and forest cover changes between 2010 and 2016 over a test site in East Africa. A dedicated approach allows comparing six different datasets and deriving statistically robust accuracy estimates. This study aims at supporting the design of a future potential operational forest monitoring component within the Copernicus Land Service.