The Application of Sentinel-2 Data for Automatic Forest Cover Changes Assessment – Białowieża Primeval Forest Case Study

Abstract Sentinel-2 mission, as a part of European Space Agency Earth Observation Program Copernicus, designed specifically for Earth surface observations provides images in 13 bands. That imaging is used to analyse many subject areas as Land monitoring, Emergency management, Security and Climate change. In the presented paper the application of Sentinel-2 data for automatic forest cover changes detection has been analysed. As input data, B02, B03, B04 and B08 bands have been used to compute Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (ENDVI). To track changes in the forest cover over the years, for each pixel the difference in the value of vegetation indices between consecutive years have been calculated. Then the threshold was set at the level of 0.15. The values of differences above the threshold mean a significant decrease in the quality of vegetation and may be considered areas of deforestation.