Abstract
Climate change and the growing number of forest damage demanded a response from forestry professionals. Satellite-based remote sensing enables an environment-friendly way of forest monitoring as part of sustainable forest management. A novel forest monitoring approach was created in Hungary to utilize high-resolution Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing for the detection of forest disturbances remotely. The processing, analysing, and visualization of vegetation index (NDVI and Z NDVI) maps derived from satellite imagery took place online, in the cloud, for the period 2017–2023. My results indicated that the satellite imagery and ground-based reports provided suitable input for sustainable forest damage monitoring. In the seven-year-long period, the annual index changes corresponded to the experienced weather extremes and the Z NDVI values captured both the negative and positive forest health changes. The image classification was proved to be useful to show deviations from normal forest state since 67 % of pixels were in the forest damage category in 2022 when a historic drought occurred. In 2023 the regeneration was visible. The promising results and the flexibility of the GEE made it possible to enhance sustainable management and this system could be extended to include urban forests as well.
