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EO and AI for Forestry – training course with European Space Agency on UL FGG (September 20‒24, 2021)

  • Forest provide food, energy, income for more than one billion people.
  • Theey are home to 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity.
  • Biodiversity is under serious threat from natural disasters, climate change, deforestation and forest degradation.
  • Sustainable forest management is very important for climate change mitigation and for all species survival (even human beings).
  • Forest and biodiversity can be sustainably managed also by remote sensing and artificial intelligence.

The European Space Agency (ESA) in cooperation with the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering University of Ljubljana and with the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia is organising 10th Advanced Training Course on Land Remote Sensing – Earth observation and artificial intelligence for Forestry. The 5-day course will be held at the UL FGG from 20 to 24 September 2021. This course is dedicated to training the next generation of Earth Observation (EO) scientists and experts working in forestry domain to exploit data from EO missions (e.g. the Copernicus Sentinels) and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) for science and applications development. The course is part of ESA’s EO Science for Society – Scientific Exploitation element of EOEP-5 (the fifth cycle of ESA’s Earth Observation Envelope Programme).

The Advanced Training Course on Land Remote Sensing – EO and AI for Forestry aims at:

  • Training the next generation of scientists and professionals on remote sensing for land surfaces, with the focus on forestry,
  • Explaining the theoretical principles, processing algorithms, data products and their use in forestry applications,
  • Introducing tool and methods for the exploitation of EO satellite data, in particular, the Sentinels,
  • Stimulating the exploitation of EO and AI in the domain of forestry,
  • Demonstrating cloud-based, large-scale processing (Forestry Thematic Application Platform).

The training will include theory and hands-on sessions on the following topics:

  • Introduction to the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions and their performance,
  • Introduction to ESA BIOMASS mission,
  • Natural disturbances of forests,
  • Forest cover monitoring and change detection with optical and SAR remote sensing,
  • Forest fires detection with optical and thermal remote sensing,
  • Deforestation and forest degradation,
  • PolInSAR and TomoSAR for forests,
  • Forest structure and biomass retrieval using SAR,
  • Accuracy in forest mapping,
  • S2 and Landsat time-series for forests monitoring,
  • EO Browser,
  • AI for forests,
  • Forestry TEP,
  • Training on the use of SNAP toolbox.

More information: https://landtraining2021.esa.int/.

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