Zoltan Szantoi

• Ph.D.
• Land Applications Scientist at European Space Agency

The Copernicus High-Resolution Hot Spot Monitoring activity (C-HSM) delivers a global dataset of Key Landscapes for Conservation (KLC), which are characterized by pronounced anthropogenic pressures that require high mapping accuracy. Detailed land cover and land cover change map products are freely available through the activity and include extensi...

The trade in agricultural commodities is a backbone of the global economy but is a major cause of negative social and environmental impacts, not least deforestation. Commodity traders are key actors in efforts to eliminate deforestation-they are active in the regions where commodities are produced and represent a "pinch point" in global trade that...

Crop calendars provide valuable information on the timing of important stages of crop development such as the planting or Start of Season (SOS) and harvesting dates or End of Season (EOS). This information is critical for many crop monitoring applications such as crop-type mapping, crop condition monitoring, and crop yield estimation and forecastin...

Plain Language Summary Water lost by plants through evaporation is strongly linked with the temperature at an unknown height within the canopy. Because this in‐canopy temperature cannot be typically measured by a satellite, the majority of the global evaporation models substitute this with skin temperature, or the near‐surface temperature observed...

Deforestation is a documented driver of biodiversity loss and ecosystem services in the tropics. However, less is known on how interacting regional and local-level anthropogenic and ecological disturbances such as land use activities, human populations, and armed conflict affect carbon storage and emissions in Neotropical forests. Therefore, we exp...

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) cultivation in Central Africa (CA) has become important because of the increased global demand for vegetable oils. The region is highly suitable for the cultivation of oil palm and this increases pressure on forest biodiversity in the region. Accurate maps are therefore needed to understand trends in oil palm expansion...

Oil palm is a controversial crop, primarily because it is associated with negative environmental impacts such as tropical deforestation. Mapping the crop and its characteristics, such as age, is crucial for informing public and policy discussions regarding these impacts. Oil palm has received substantial mapping efforts, but accurate and up-to-date...

Oil palm is a controversial crop, primarily because it is associated with negative environmental impacts such as tropical deforestation. Mapping the crop and its characteristics, such as age, is crucial for informing public and policy discussions regarding these impacts. Oil palm has received substantial mapping efforts, but up-to-date accurate oil...

The challenge of global food security in the face of population growth, conflict, and climate change requires a comprehensive understanding of cropped areas, irrigation practices, and the distribution of major commodity crops like maize and wheat. However, such understanding should preferably be updated at seasonal intervals for each agricultural s...

Demand for coconut is expected to rise, but the global distribution of coconut palm has been studied little, which hinders the discussion of its impacts. Here, we produced the first 20 m global coconut palm layer using a U-Net model that was trained on annual Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 composites for the year 2020. The overall accuracy was 99.04 ± 0...

The ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) is a scientific mission that collects high spatio‐temporal resolution (∼70 m, 1‐5 days average revisit time) thermal images since its launch on 29 June 2018. As a predecessor of future missions, one of the main objectives of ECOSTRESS is to retrieve and understand t...

Land use and Land cover change (LULCC) is a major global problem, and projecting change is critical for policy decision-making. Understanding LULCCs at the watershed level is essential for transboundary river basin management. The present study aims to analyse the past and future LULCCs in two significant watersheds of the Senegal River basin (S...

The challenge of global food security in the face of population growth, conflict and climate change requires a comprehensive understanding of cropped areas, irrigation practices and the distribution of major commodity crops like maize and wheat. However, such understanding should preferably be updated at seasonal intervals for each agricultural sys...

The role of animal movement in spreading infectious diseases is highly recognized by various legislations and institutions such as the World Organisation for Animal Health and the International Animal Health Code. The increased interactions at the nexus of human-animal-ecosystem interface have seen an unprecedented introduction and reintroduction o...

Crop type maps are essential for a wide range of applications such as crop monitoring, and yield estimation. In addition, Earth Observation (EO) systems allow robust and timely mapping of the earth’s surface, usually based on time-series. Yet, existing crop type maps are either global at coarse spatial resolution, or have a local or regional scope....

Vegetable oil crops cover over half of global agricultural land and have varying environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Demand for coconut oil is expected to rise, but the global distribution of coconut is understudied, which hinders the discussion of its impacts. Here, we present the first 20-meter global coconut layer, produced using deep learn...

High spatial resolution land surface temperature (LST, <100 m) is crucial for agricultural water management, crop water stress monitoring, fire mapping, urban heat island study and volcano eruption detection. LST retrievals from the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) launched in June 2018, together with...

Space-based cropland phenology monitoring substantially assists agricultural managing practices and plays an important role in crop yield predictions. Multitemporal satellite observations allow analyzing vegetation seasonal dynamics over large areas by using vegetation indices or by deriving biophysical variables. The Nile Delta represents about ha...

The trade in agricultural commodities is a backbone of the global economy but is a major cause of negative social and environmental impacts, not least deforestation. Commodity traders are key actors in efforts to eliminate deforestation - they are active in the regions where commodities are produced and represent a 'pinch-point' in global trade tha...

Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana are the largest producers of cocoa in the world. In recent decades the cultivation of this crop has led to the loss of vast tracts of forest areas in both countries. Efficient and accurate methods for remotely identifying cocoa plantations are essential to the implementation of sustainable cocoa practices and for the periodi...

The Copernicus High-Resolution Hot Spot Monitoring activity (C-HSM) delivers a global dataset of Key Landscapes for Conservation (KLC), which are characterized by pronounced anthropo-genic pressures that require high mapping accuracy. Detailed land cover and land cover change map products are freely available through the activity and include extens...

Natural resources are increasingly threatened in the world. Threats to biodiversity and human well-being pose enormous challenges in many vulnerable areas. Effective monitoring and protection of sites with strategic conservation importance require timely monitoring, with a particular focus on certain land cover classes that are especially vulnerabl...

Natural resources are increasingly being threatened in the world. Threats to biodiversity and human well-being pose enormous challenges to many vulnerable areas. Effective monitoring and protection of sites with strategic conservation importance require timely monitoring with special focus on certain land cover classes which are especially vulnerab...

Oil seed crops, especially oil palm, are among the most rapidly expanding agricultural land uses, and their expansion is known to cause significant environmental damage. Accordingly, these crops often feature in public and policy debates which are hampered or biased by a lack of accurate information on environmental impacts. In particular, the lack...

Food security has become a global concern for humanity with rapid population growth, requiring a sustainable assessment of natural resources. Soil is one of the most important sources that can help to bridge the food demand gap to achieve food security if well assessed and managed. The aim of this study was to determine the soil quality index (SQI)...

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires balancing demands on land between agriculture (SDG 2) and biodiversity (SDG 15). The production of vegetable oils and, in particular, palm oil, illustrates these competing demands and trade-offs. Palm oil accounts for ~40% of the current global annual demand for vegetable oil as food, ani...

Mounting social and economic demands on natural resources increasingly threaten key areas for conservation in Africa. Threats to biodiversity pose an enormous challenge to these vulnerable areas. Effective protection of sites with strategic conservation importance requires timely and highly detailed geospatial monitoring. Larger ecological zones an...

ARD20 Satellite Data Interoperability Workshop, November 2-6, 2020 https://www.ard.zone/ard20

The continued increase of anthropogenic pressure on the Earth's ecosystems is degrading the natural environment and then decreasing the services it provides to humans. The type, quantity, and quality of many of those services are directly connected to land cover, yet competing demands for land continue to drive rapid land cover change, affecting ec...

Over the past several years Analysis Ready Data has been a major focus for the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS). The CEOS Analysis Ready Data concept within the context of Land started in 2015 and has been led by the CEOS Land Surface Imaging Virtual Constellation (LSI-VC) community. LSI-VC has developed the definition that CEOS use...

Oil seed crops, especially oil palm, are among the most rapidly expanding agricultural land uses, and their expansion is known to cause significant environmental damage. Accordingly, these crops often feature in public and policy debates, which are hampered or biased by a lack of accurate information on environmental impacts. In particular, the lac...

Special Issue on Copernicus Sentinel-2 Calibration and Validation activities

Abstract. Threats to biodiversity pose an enormous challenge for Africa. Mounting social and economic demands on natural resources increasingly threaten key areas for conservation. Effective protection of sites of strategic conservation importance requires timely and highly detailed geospatial monitoring. Larger ecological zones and wildlife corrid...

Oil palm is rapidly expanding in Southeast Asia and represents one of the major drivers of deforestation in the region. This includes both industrial-scale and smallholder plantations, the management of which entails specific challenges, with either operational scale having its own particular social and environmental challenges. Although, past stud...

MODIS-based NDVI time series (2000–2016) was applied to monitor sub-annual forest disturbance in the Mexican state of Michoacán, with an algorithm that decomposes the time-series data into a harmonic function and a trend. To detect change, a moving sum of residuals between the observed and predicted NDVI values was compared with that from the refer...

Copernicus Services Global Land Monitoring - Hot-spots in Africa

Copernicus, the European Commission’s (EC) Earth Observation Program launched the Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B satellites in 2015 and 2017, respectively. The Copernicus program, formerly called the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), started in 1998 with the overarching aim to become Europe’s operational Earth Observation monitori...

The production of global land cover products has accelerated significantly over the past decade thanks to the availability of higher spatial and temporal resolution satellite data and increased computation capabilities. The quality of these products should be assessed according to internationally promoted requirements e.g., by the Committee on Eart...

The global land HOT SPOT mapping project focuses on producing land-cover and land-cover change maps for specific regions of interest. In order to ascertain whether the maps produced meet the specified minimum (thematic) quality, it is necessary to measure and assess this by experienced validators. The quality measures used within this project are b...

Significance Although oil palm cultivation represents an important source of income for many tropical countries, its future expansion is a primary threat to tropical forests and biodiversity. In this context, and especially in regions where industrial palm oil production is still emerging, identifying “areas of compromise,” that is, areas with high...

Satellite remote sensing presents an amazing opportunity to inform biodiversity conservation by inexpensively gathering repeated monitoring information for vast areas of the Earth. However, these observations first need processing and interpretation if they are to inform conservation action. Through a series of case studies, Satellite Remote Sensin...

USGS has recently convened an advisory committee to determine whether users would be prepared to pay for increased spectral and spatial resolution images (7). Requiring users to pay would put these images beyond the reach of conservationists

Spatial analysis reaches across all the subdisciplines of anthropology. A cultural anthropologist, for example, can use such analysis to trace the extent of distinctive cultural practices; an archaeologist can use it to understand the organization of ancient irrigation systems; a primatologist to quantify the density of primate nesting sites; a pal...

For many land monitoring applications using remote sensing, lack of data is no longer an issue, as it may have been in the past. Programs, such as Copernicus by the European Commission and the Landsat Missions by the United States Geological Survey, have adopted systematic acquisition strategies, and distribute vast amounts of satellite data under...

This paper provides a structure to the recently intensified discussion around 'data cubes' as a means to facilitate management and analysis of very large volumes of structured geospatial data. The goal is to arrive to a widely agreed and harmonised definition of a 'data cube'. To this end, we propose an approach that deconstructs the 'data cube' co...

We propose an automated processing workflow to detect and classify changes in bitemporal very high-resolution (VHR) SmallSat imagery. The workflow consists of two preprocessing steps: an image registration method with a cross correlation approach and, second, a radiometric normalization based on regression of automatically detected invariant pixels...

Presentation about the complexity of DataCube systems and the challenges to make them interoperable

The Copernicus Global Land - High Resolution Hot Spot Monitoring activity provides detailed land information on specific areas of interest. This activity under the Copernicus Global Land Component of the Land Service answers to ad-hoc requests and concentrate mainly within the domain of the sustainable management of natural resources, with an initi...

The Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) concept proposed by GEO BON, Space Agencies, and the Earth Observation research community at large aims to support efforts for biodiversity monitoring. GOFC-GOLD and GEO BON propose a new sourcebook to promote the best operational monitoring practices for the relevant EBVs based on scientific literature, a...

Effective, timely and informed conservation and sustainable development decisions require consistently produced and trustworthy biodiversity data, derived from in-situ and remotely sensed sources and scalable from the local to global. Producing such data requires clear monitoring objectives driven by user needs and a coordinated approach to allow f...

Conservation of the Sumatran orangutans' (Pongo abelii) habitat is threatened by change in land use/land cover (LULCC), due to the logging of its native primary forest habitat, and the primary forest conversion to oil palm, rubber tree, and coffee plantations. Frequent LULCC monitoring is vital to rapid conservation interventions. Due to the costs...

Authors In addition to the core editors, a number of international experts in remote sensing, and biodiversity field measurement have contributed to the development of the Sourcebook and are thankfully acknowledged for their support. This Sourcebook is the result of a joint voluntary effort from more than 70 contributing authors from different inst...

Remote sensing has become increasingly important in vegetation mapping. Early applications pertained to aerial photography, but more recently satellite imagery with a huge range of spatial and temporal resolutions is in use that increases the applicability's from entire ecosystems to specific vegetation types. Some mapping projects apply remote sen...

Standardised and harmonised biodiversity data and monitoring methods are required in order to assess how tropical forest biodiversity is evolving at the global scale, and what the drivers of change are. Collaborative efforts towards the development of such harmonised monitoring methods are carried out by national and regional forest agencies, the s...

Assessing the status and monitoring the trends of land cover dynamics in and around protected areas is of utmost importance for park managers and decision makers. Moreover, to support the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)'s Strategic Action Plan including the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, such efforts are necessary to set a framework to reach...

In recent years, the popularity of tree-based ensemble methods for land cover classification has increased significantly. Using WorldView-2 image data, we evaluate the potential of the oblique random forest algorithm (oRF) to classify a highly heterogeneous protected area. In contrast to the random forest (RF) algorithm, the oRF algorithm builds mu...

Monitoring is essential for conservation of sites, but capacity to undertake it in the field is often limited. Data collected by remote sensing has been identified as a partial solution to this problem, and is becoming a feasible option, since increasing quantities of satellite data in particular are becoming available to conservationists. When sui...