Country-wide, high-resolution monitoring of forest browning with Sentinel-2

Abstract

Natural and anthropogenic disturbances are impacting the health of forests worldwide. Monitoring forest disturbances at scale is important to inform conservation efforts. Here, we present a scalable approach for country-wide mapping of forest greenness anomalies at the 10 m resolution of Sentinel-2. Using relevant ecological and topographical context and an established representation of the vegetation cycle, we learn a predictive quantile model of the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from Sentinel-2 data. The resulting expected seasonal cycles are used to detect NDVI anomalies across Switzerland between April 2017 and August 2025. Goodness-of-fit evaluations show that the conditional model explains 65% of the observed variations in the median seasonal cycle. The model consistently benefits from the local context information, particularly during the green-up period. The approach produces coherent spatial anomaly patterns and enables country-wide quantification of forest browning. Case studies with independent reference data from known events illustrate that the model reliably detects different types of disturbances.