Combination of satellite and ground based digital data for automatic illegal logging detection

Illegal logging is an environmental crime on a global scale, and the cost of this criminal practice extends far beyond financial losses; in fact it involves environmental devastation, deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and the extinction of irreplaceable species. Addressing this issue involves implementing various solutions, including active control of forest areas and certification of the origin of timber from sustainably and legally managed resources. The EU project SINTETIC fosters the development of a highly detailed traceability system of timber products, from the standing tree to the final wooden product. This system leverages both on the ground data from the value chain and remotely sensed data to develop an early alert system for automatic detection of illegal logging operations, which in case of low intensity harvest (selective cut of best trees) produce little signal and are particularly difficult to detect with statistical models.