Nataliia Kussul

• Professor, Doctor of sciences
• Professor (Associate) at University of Maryland, College Park

The Earth Observing One (EO-1) satellite was launched in November 2000 as a one year technology demonstration mission for a variety of space technologies. After the first year, it was used as a pathfinder for the creation of SensorWebs. A SensorWeb is the integration of a variety of space, airborne and ground sensors into a loosely coupled collabor...

In this paper, we focus on the description of the Grid infrastructure that is under the development at the Space Research Institute NASU-NSAU (SRI). We describe several real-world applications that are being solved using the Grid infrastructure: numeral weather prediction (NWP), flood monitoring, and biodiversity assessment. We also review issues r...

This paper describes the objectives and achievements of the project "Data Fusion Grid Infrastructure'' jointly supported by INTAS, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the National Space Agency of Ukraine (NSAU). Within the project, a Grid infrastructure has been developed that integrates the resources of several geographically distrib...

The accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries from satellite imagery is vital for land management and crop monitoring. However, current methods face challenges due to limited dataset sizes, resolution discrepancies, and diverse environmental conditions. We address this by reformulating the task as instance segmentation and introducing t...

Монографія містить результати досліджень кафедри математичного моделювання і аналізу даних Національного технічного університету України «КПІ імені Ігоря Сікорського» для вирішення задач еколого-економічного аналізу на основі сучасних методів комп’ютерного зору і глибинного навчання. В її основу покладено результати національних і міжнародних проєк...

This article addresses the issue of imbalanced datasets in satellite image segmentation problems, where machine learning models often neglect minority classes in favor of majority ones. We propose using spatial weight masks for the loss function computation taking into account the reliability index of individual pixels. This approach enhances segme...

This study aims to contribute to the advancement of satellite intelligence for agricultural monitoring, damage assessment, and the development of effective strategies to mitigate the severe consequences of armed conflicts on global food security. Since Ukraine is an associate member before joining Europe, currently active implementation of the Land...

This research demonstrates the potential of synergizing cutting-edge remote sensing, machine learning, and cloud computing technologies to tackle complex environmental challenges at a continental scale. The developed methodologies pave the way for future advancements in forest disease monitoring, fire danger, conservation efforts, and environmental...

This paper introduces a methodology based on machine learning and remote sensing for detecting military-induced damages to agricultural lands in Ukraine using free Sentinel-2 satellite data. The most informative spectral bands (B2, B3) and vegetation indices (NDVI, GCI) were experimentally selected for recognizing damaged fields through the Random...

The objective of this study is to increase the spatial resolution of data on the level of chlorophyll-a in the Mediterranean Sea using satellite images and ground measurements. The goal of this study is to develop an information technology based on machine learning to create chlorophyll-a concentration maps with high spatial resolution for the pilo...

Timely detection of forest diseases is an important task for their prevention and spread limitation. The usage of satellite imagery provides capabilities for large-scale forest monitoring. Machine learning models allow to automate the analysis of these data for anomaly detection indicating diseases. However, selecting informative features is key to...

Climate change necessitates the relevance of renewable energy utilization worldwide. The Green Deal defines the energy development policy in Europe until 2030. This challenge holds particular significance for Ukraine in the context of post-war energy infrastructure recovery. Therefore, an important issue is the analysis of the suitability of Ukrain...

This study addresses the issue of imbalanced datasets in satellite image segmentation tasks, where machine learning models often neglect minority classes in favor of majority ones. We propose using spatial weight masks for the loss function computation to take into account the reliability score of individual pixels. This approach enhances segmentat...

The Russian-Ukrainian War, ongoing since 2014, impacts an area containing Emerald Network environmental-protection sites created through the implementation of the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. Here we explore the impact of this conflict on institutional links supporting environmental sustainability a...

This paper addresses the problem of processing large volumes of satellite data and compares different cloud platforms for potential solutions. Existing cloud platforms like Google Earth Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and CREODIAS have been used to tackle this challenge. However, this study proposes an optimal pipeline for satellite data process...

Deep learning models offer great potential for advancing land monitoring using satellite data. However, they face challenges due to imbalanced real-world data distributions of land cover and crop types, hindering scalability and transferability. This letter presents a novel data augmentation method employing Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (...

Цілі сталого розвитку (ЦСР), також відомі як глобальні цілі, прийняті Організацією Об’єднаних Націй у 2015 р. як універсальний заклик до дій щодо подолання бідності, захисту планети, забезпечення миру та покращення якості життя всіх людей до 2030 р. Цілі розвитку спрямовані на те, щоб до 2030 р. покінчити з усіма формами голоду, щоб усі люди отриму...

Fire is one of the most common disturbances in natural ecosystems. The analysis of various sources of information (official and unofficial) about the fires in Ukraine (2019–2020) showed a lack of timely and reliable information. Satellite observation is of crucial importance to provide accurate, reliable, and timely information. This paper aims to...

Development of modern observation technologies, increase of the amount of open data, and development of new approaches to their processing open new opportunities in carrying out applied research in the economic activity of people. The central approach in this field is the use of the deep learning methods in the data processing and analysis of their...

The monograph dedicates to the results of development and implementation by Ukrainian scientists of information technologies and services for estimation indicators of sustainable development based on the use of satellite Earth observation data. The work is aimed at solving current socio-economic problems, in particular, achieving the goals of susta...

Satellite data of high spatial resolution have become publicly available since the launch of the EU Copernicus program, and their automated processing methods for solving a large number of diverse applied problems have received further development. Our task in this article is to analyze the dynamics of the land degradation level using land degradat...

Розвиток сучасних технологій спостереження Землі, збільшення обсягу відкритих даних та розроблення нових підходів до їхнього оброблення відкривають нові можливості у проведенні прикладних досліджень економічної активності людства. Основним підходом у цій галузі є застосування методів глибинного навчання у процесах оброблення даних та аналізу їхніх...

Проблема сталого розвитку міст привертає широку увагу в країнах всього світу, оскільки вона тісно пов’язана із якістю життя суспільства. Зростання площ міських територій часто є непропорційним відносно темпів зростання населення в країнах, що розвиваються, і тому цю розбіжність не можна контролювати за допомогою статистики. У цій статті здійснено д...

The past several decades has seen considerable land cover and land use change (LCLUC) in Ukraine. These changes are a result from unprecedented environmental and climate disturbances as well as highly sensitive political and economic disruption, most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The impacts of these disturbances must be properly monito...

The agricultural sector plays a very important role in the country’s economy. Often, crop failures are the cause of protracted financial crises, which are very difficult to overcome. Fortunately, modern scientific methods allow us to predict the yield of certain crops in selected fields based on data on soil properties and weather conditions. Such...

The stockpiling and retention of waste is an actual problem for Ukraine today. Count of illegal dumps increases every day because many landfills are full. Special services of waste monitoring provide only partial information about the current state of waste dumps all over the country. They can’t analyse landfills’ size information and their changes...

Навчальний посібник «Аналіз даних. Лабораторний практикум» присвячено вивченню аналізу даних за допомогою мови Python студентами за спеціальністю 113 «Прикладна математика». Метою є отримання навичок аналізу даних, очистки даних та побудови моделей на основі наявних даних для їх подальшого використання. Посібник містить необхідний теоретичний матер...

1st July 2021 the law on the creation of land market start effect in Ukraine. As a result, land appraisal became cornerstone task in Ukrainian agriculture sector. The official methodology on land appraisal includes use of soil fertility characteristics combined with coefficients related to the distance to the infrastructure objects or settlements a...

In the past few years, medium and high-resolution data became freely available for downloading. It provides great opportunity for researchers not to select between solving the task with high-resolution data on small territory or on global scale, but with low-resolution satellite images. Due to high spectral and spatial resolution of the data, Senti...

Iдея роботи полягає у тому, щоб застосувати генеративнi моделi для створення штучних навчальних вибiрок, тим самим збiльшити й урiзноманiтнити навчальнi вибiрки для моделей семантичної сегментацiї супутникових знiмкiв. А саме: побудувати генеративно-змагальну мережу, яка на основi видозмiнених масок зможе генерувати супутниковi знiмки, подiбнi до р...

Over the course of the 21st century, a century in which the urbanization process of the previous one is ever on the rise, the novel smart city concept has rapidly evolved and now encompasses the broader aspect of sustainability. Concurrently, there has been a sea change in the domain of Earth observation (EO) where scientific and technological brea...

Навчальний посібник «Інформаційні технології аналізу великих гетерогенних даних. Лабораторний практикум» присвячено інформаційним технологіям для аналізу гетерогенних геопросторових даних за спеціальностю 113 «Прикладна математика» та може бути корисним для здобувачів вищої освіти інших технічних спеціальностей. Метою навчальної дисципліни є формув...

Навчальний посібник «Методи глибокого навчання на різнорідних даних. Лабораторний практикум» присвячено вивченню методів та алгоритмів глибинного навчання та аналізу гетерогенних геопросторових даних здобувачами вищої освіти за спеціальностю 113 «Прикладна математика» та може бути корисним для інших технічних спеціальностей. Метою навчальної дисц...

Навчальний посібник «Методи аналізу великих гетерогенних даних. Лабораторний практикум» присвячено вивченню методів та алгоритмів аналізу гетерогенних геопросторових даних здобувачами вищої освіти за спеціальностю 113 «Прикладна математика» та може бути корисним для студентів інших технічних спеціальностей. Метою навчальної дисципліни є формування...

Several holistic approaches are based on the description of socio-ecological systems to address the sustainability challenge. Essential Variables (EVs) have the potential to support these approaches by describing the status of the Earth system through monitoring and modeling. The different classes of EVs can be organized along the environmental pol...

Crop rotation is an important determining factor of crop productivity. Sustainable agriculture requires correct rules of crop rotation. Failure to comply with these rules can lead to deterioration of soil biochemical characteristics and land degradation. In Ukraine as well as in many other countries, sunflower monocropping is common practice and th...

Since the launch of ESA Copernicus program, satellite data of high resolution became publicly available and methods and tools for their automated processing to solve a wide range of applications have developed rapidly. An important scientific task is to assess land degradation and achieve zero levels of degradation. There are many methods for deter...

Acquired images often have a large size while there can be limitations on communication line capacity and/or storage memory. Then, there is a need to compressed them. If lossy compression is applied, compressed images should have quality enough high for solving the tasks of their further processing as segmentation, classification, object detection....

Проблема сталого розвитку міст привертає широку увагу в країнах всього світу, оскільки вона тісно пов’язана із якістю життя суспільства. Зростання площ міських територій часто є непропорційним відносно темпів зростання населення в країнах, що розвиваються, і тому цю розбіжність не можна контролювати за допомогою статистики. У цій статті здійснено д...

Lossy compression of remote sensing data has found numerous applications. Several requirements are usually imposed on methods and algorithms to be used. A large compression ratio has to be provided, introduced distortions should not lead to sufficient reduction of classification accuracy, compression has to be realized quickly enough, etc. An addit...

Ukraine is an associate member of the European Union, and in the coming years, it is expected that all the data and services already used by European Union countries will become available for Ukraine. An important program, which is the basis for building European monitoring services for smart cities, is the Copernicus program. The two most importan...

Agriculture land appraisal analysis is an important component of the land market. This task is especially essential for Ukraine, which plans to lift the moratorium on land transactions and legalize farmland sales in 2021. Most post-Soviet countries adopted the notion of a soil bonitet—a quantitative score representing natural soil fertility. This s...

Ukraine is an associate member of the European Union and in the coming years it is expected that all the data and services already used by European Union countries will become available for Ukraine. An important program, which is the basis for building European monitoring services for Smart Cities, is the Copernicus program. The two most important...

Open burning is illegal in Ukraine, yet Ukraine has, on average, 300 times more fire activity per year (2001-2019) than most European countries. In 2016 and 2017, 47% of Ukraine was identified as cultivated area, with a total of 70% of land area dedicated to agricultural use. Over 57% of all active fires in Ukraine detected using space-borne Visibl...

The water cloud model (WCM) can be inverted to estimate leaf area index (LAI) using the intensity of backscatter from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors. Published studies have demonstrated that the WCM can accurately estimate LAI if the model is effectively calibrated. However, calibration of this model requires access to field measures of LAI...

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators assessment is a very important task for today’s global scientific communities. Remote sensing data has been used to solve many problems in the process of ensuring sustainable land use and city’s management. One such example is assessment of SDG indicator 11.3.1: "Ratio of land consumption rate to popu...

The ERA-PLANET Horizon 2020 project "The European Network for Observing our Changing Planet" is a contribution of the European Community for addressing the objectives of international agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement on Climate and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. One of the four stra...

This paper deals with processing of multichannel remote sensing images for which it is difficult and often impossible to carry out any stage of data processing in an interactive manner and, thus, full or, at least, partial automation is needed. Despite of existence of many methods, it is difficult to choose the best or an appropriate one and/or to...

Globally, drought constitutes a serious threat to food and water security. The complexity and multivariate nature of drought challenges its assessment, especially at local scales. The study aimed to assess spatiotemporal patterns of crop condition and drought impact at the spatial scale of field management units with a combined use of time-series f...

Ukraine is on the verge of the land market opening. This process should begin in 2020, when free sale of land will be introduced. Now, only the land lease is officially allowed. To ensure transparency, equity and reliability of this process, objective information on real land use and its history, crop development state in each vegetation season is...

У доповіді наведено інформацію про перспективи інтеграції української науки до європейського дослідницького простору та основні напрями діяльності з досягнення цієї мети. Розглянуто результати співпраці з європейським дослідницьким простором у контексті реалізації проєкту ERA-PLANET в рамках програми «Горизонт-2020», виокремлено найбільш перспектив...

Україна стоїть на порозі запровадження ринку землі, відкриття якого заплановане на 2020 р. Для забезпечення прозорості та надійності цього процесу потрібна достовірна інформація про реальне землекористування, його історію, стан сільськогосподарських культур у кожному сезоні та інші показники, які істотно впливають на ринкову вартість землі. Сьогодн...

While people are aware that there is a continuing conflict in Ukraine, there is little understanding of its impact. The military conflict in South-Eastern Ukraine has been on-going since 2014, with a major socio-economic impact on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In this study, we quantify land cover land use changes in those regions related to cro...

For evaluating how far we are from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and how big the progress is a global indicator framework was developed by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goals Indicators (IAEG-SDGs). In this paper, we propose an improved methodology for calculating indicator 2.4.1 "Proportion of agricultu...

For accurate crop classification, it is necessary to use time-series of high-resolution satellite data to better discriminate among certain crop types. This task brings the following challenges: a large amount of satellite data for download, Big data processing and computational resources for utilization of state-of-the-art classification approache...

Free access to the paper for 50 days: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1YvAs14ynSEen9 -------Cropland maps derived from satellite imagery have become a common source of information to estimate food production, support land use policies, and measure the environmental impacts of agriculture. Cropland classification models are typically calibrated with...

A combination of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 offers a high frequency of observations (3–5 days) at moderate spatial resolution (10–30 m), which is essential for crop yield studies. Existing methods traditionally apply vegetation indices (VIs) that incorporate surface reflectances (SRs) in two or more spectral bands into a single variable, and rarely a...

Monitoring of agricultural regions is an important task. Recent trends to solve it are based on applying multi-temporal remote sensing in order to obtain reliable crop classification maps. If a radar remote sensing is used, speckle presence in the original data reduces a classification accuracy. A negative impact of speckle can be reduced by image...

There is a growing recognition of the interdependencies among the supply systems that rely upon food, water and energy. Billions of people lack safe and sufficient access to these systems, coupled with a rapidly growing global demand and increasing resource constraints. Modeling frameworks are considered one of the few means available to understand...