Assessing tropical forest disturbance and regrowth using earth observation source

Samenvatting

Tropical forests are hotspots of global biodiversity and play a critical role in mitigating climate change. The disturbance and regrowth of tropical forests affect the delivery of ecosystem services and these processes introduce considerable uncertainties in understanding tropical forest dynamics and the global carbon cycle. Especially for regrowing forests, despite its large carbon sink potential for climate change mitigation, significant uncertainty remains in the recovery rates of aboveground biomass and what promotes or hampers the recovery. Earth observation sources provide unprecedented opportunities for characterizing tropical forest disturbance and regrowth in space and time.

This research aims to leverage earth observation sources for assessing tropical forest disturbance and regrowth. The integration enables a comprehensive understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of tropical forests. Leveraging earth observation sources provides us with valuable and spatially explicit information about the changes occurring in these critical ecosystems.