Monitoring forest disturbances and substantial changes in Europe as a permanent service based on S2 & Landsat comprising rapid assessment and annual maps

Disturbances caused by storms, bark beetles and fires have increased in Europes forests throughout the twentieth century and are likely to increase further, resulting in a wide range of negative impacts on the quality of life, economy and the environment. As a result, there is an urgent need to provide information on forest health and vitality, including forest disturbances (i.e. forest fires, storm damage, drought stress, insect and disease outbreaks), which must be readily available to end-users, i.e. forest policy, forest administration and forest management planning entities. At the same time the Sentinel 2 A/B and Landsat data from 2017/2018 onwards usher in a new era forest monitoring of forests. Based on Sentinel 2 A/B and Landsat data within the H2020 project DIABOLO (diabolo-project.eu) a system is developed and tested both facilitating both a rapid assessment (near real time) as well as annual maps designed for a pan-European coverage. Results from the service development covering mapping examples from Europe will be presented and discussed.