Early detection of vegetation cover change, in the water recharge areas of the Cuenca canton, using remote sensors and Deep Learning

The plant cover of high mountain ecosystems such as forests and Andean moors, provide unique environments from an ecological point of view, their biodiversity and their ecosystem services. Conservation, sustainable management and monitoring is essential to ensure key ecosystem services, including water recharge. However, both globally and locally, they face increasing threats due to land use change, urban expansion, agricultural activities and forest fires. Several investigations have been carried out around monitoring and arresting cover change using mainly remote sensing data thanks to the wide availability of earth observation data. Among others, ESA's Copernicus program provides data, cloud processing and services for land surveillance applications, forest fires, disaster monitoring, and others. On the other hand, there is a rapid advance in artificial intelligence, particularly Deep Learning models pre-trained using satellite images.
In this context, the objective of this research is the generation of a tool for early detection of plant cover change based on Deep Learning models and data from remote sensors, adapted to areas of Andean páramo and forests, which facilitates timely decision-making for the actors involved in the planning, restoration and conservation of these high Andean ecosystems.
This research will mainly use data from the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 sensors, incorporating elevation data, also to PlanetScope data will be used for research purposes. It is highlighted that there will be geoinformation of the study area generated by ETAPA EP, who is the entity with jurisdiction in this study area and with whom the University of Cuenca maintains cooperation agreements for these purposes. The results achieved will be disseminated as scientific articles, as well as socialized to the actors involved, and the generated tool will be made available for use at the prototype level of the end user of ETAPA EP, contributing in this way both from the scientific point of view and technological development. of applied research.

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