Mapping drivers of tropical forest loss with satellite image time series and machine learning

The rates of tropical deforestation remain high, resulting in carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and impacts on local communities. To design effective policies to tackle this, it is necessary to know what the drivers behind deforestation are. Since drivers vary in space and time, producing accurate spatially explicit maps with regular temporal updates is essential. Drivers can be recognized from satellite imagery but the scale of tropical deforestation makes it unfeasible to do so manually. Machine learning opens up possibilities for automating and scaling up this process. In this study, we developed and trained a deep learning model to classify the drivers of any forest loss—including deforestation—from satellite image time series. Our model architecture allows understanding of how the input time series is used to make a prediction, showing the model learns different patterns for recognizing each driver and highlighting the need for temporal data. We used our model to classify over $588^{^{\prime}}000$ sites to produce a map detailing the drivers behind tropical forest loss. The results confirm that the majority of it is driven by agriculture, but also show significant regional differences. Such data is a crucial source of information to enable targeting specific drivers locally and can be updated in the future using free satellite data.