Greenness of Swiss Forests

We will develop an anomaly detection of the “greenness” of forests in Switzerland. Greenness is monitored by satellites and reflects the impacts of climate extremes (droughts, frost, storm, etc.). Detecting where and when climate extremes lead to vegetation stress and anomalous leaf senescence (browning) is challenging. Earth observation data captures these effects, but extracting information from the large and noisy data is challenging. However, the sheer volume of the data, combined with complementary geodata, enables novel machine learning-based methods to be applied for the task. This project explores new solutions and find answers for an important task - mapping and quantifying impacts by climate extremes.

This project is funded as a Swiss Data Science Center-University of Bern Pilot Project and is supported by Dr. Michele Volpi (SDSC) and David Brüggemann (SDSC).