Environment monitoring in Ukraine conflict areas
The main sources of potential pollution during armed conflicts are usually heavy industrial sites and critical infrastructure that, when damaged, could result in major chemical releases. Therefore, a useful starting point is to identify vulnerable locations associated with such sites. For Ukraine, oil and gas industries are of particular relevance as well as the nuclear plants. Also agriculture activity is one of the most important sectors for Ukraine economy with a global relevance in terms of food security. Ukraine is one of the biggest exporters of wheat, delivering to many countries, where the food situation is linked to the production of it. In this context of war, many agricultural fields have been abandoned due to the lack of people.
In this use case a solution for biomass monitoring as a proxy for cropland changes was developed. Vegetation can be monitored using Sentinel-2 indexes as NDVI or for biomass LAI, however optical imagery is dependant of cloud coverage, in this way a prototype of fusion was built for estimating biomass using Sentinel-1 imagery