Applications of remote sensing for tropical forest restoration: challenges and opportunities

ABSTRACT: The tremendous physical and material efforts, required to accurately assess forest degradation and to plan and monitor vegetation recovery using conventional ground surveys, often limit the success of tropical forest restoration projects. Remote sensing has become an important tool for biodiversity monitoring, ecological studies and climate change assessments. It has enormous potential to automate assessments of forest degradation, and to standardize and increase accuracy of information at multiple temporal and spatial scales, throughout the forest restoration process. It also drastically reduces labour costs of vegetation surveys. Remote sensing data vary in their complexity, from two-dimensional RGB images, collected from analogue or digital cameras, to three dimensional hyperspectral cubes, covering hundreds of bands. Here, we summarize current applications of available remote sensing methods for various forest restoration tasks, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of using remote sensing in automated tropical forest restoration.

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