Mapping Tropical Forest Cover and Deforestation with Planet NICFI Satellite Images and Deep Learning in Mato Grosso State (Brazil) from 2015 to 2021

Monitoring changes in tree cover for rapid assessment of deforestation is considered the critical component of any climate mitigation policy for reducing carbon. Here, we map tropical tree cover and deforestation between 2015 and 2022 using 5 m spatial resolution Planet NICFI satellite images over the state of Mato Grosso (MT) in Brazil and a U-net deep learning model. The tree cover for the state was 556510.8 km2 in 2015 (58.1 % of the MT State) and was reduced to 141598.5 km2 (14.8 % of total area) at the end of 2021. After reaching a minimum deforested area in December 2016 with 6632.05 km2, the bi-annual deforestation area only showed a slight increase between December 2016 and December 2019. A year after, the areas of deforestation almost doubled from 9944.5 km2 in December 2019 to 19817.8 km2 in December 2021. The high-resolution data product showed relatively consistent agreement with the official deforestation map from Brazil (67.2%) but deviated significantly from year of forest cover loss estimates from the Global Forest change (GFC) product, mainly due to large area of fire degradation observed in the GFC data. High-resolution imagery from Planet NICFI associated with deep learning technics can significantly improve mapping deforestation extent in tropics.