A Novel Approch to Monitor Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest By Means of Sentinel-1 and TanDEM-X Data

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel approach to monitor the evolution of deforested areas in the Amazon rainforest, by combining Sentinel-1 and TanDEM-X SAR data. The idea is firstly to exploit the large coverage and short revisit time provided by the constellation of Sentinel-1 satellites in order to cover the entire arch of deforestation about ones per month. The goal is here to discriminate forest/non-forest by exploiting C-band interferometric signatures and to identify the so-called deforestation hot-spots: local areas characterized by a significant amount of on-going deforestation activities. Secondly, high-resolution time series of bistatic TanDEM-X data can be acquired over these hot spots with a revisit time of 11 days, and used to track fast changes at small scales, aiming at identifying specific on-going deforestation activities.