Operational deforestation detection for forest early warning systems (EWS) is a hot topic in Earth observation today. Due to the persistent cloud cover in tropical regions, active microwave is regarded as one promising technology for EWS. Despite significant progress in the last decade, a reliable, genuine deforestation EWS is still lacking, because the development of powerful algorithms demand a near perfect understanding of the forest backscatter nature. Building upon 9-years of ALOS-2 long-term pantropical forest observations with various breakthrough findings, we introduce the next-generation algorithm for L-band SAR deforestation detection which realize the first real EWS in the tropics with unmatched accuracy and speed.
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