The role of EOS in the assessment of ecosystem services in tropical forests

Sustainability management practices that align with the goals defined by the UN focus on protecting habitats and minimizing environmental footprint. It is only possible to adequately address these issues by conducting ecosystem service assessment to evaluate their current and predict future state. However, in the cases of remote areas with a limited direct access that are typical of many tropical forests, the very acquisition of required data is a challenge which could be dealt with by using data generated by NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS). Accordingly, the present study is aimed to answer the following three questions: (1) can EOS assist in the assessment of ecosystems services? (2) how can the state of the ecosystem services be estimated and how can EOS be used for this purpose? (3) what kind of EOS is suitable for the assessment of specific ecosystem services in tropical forests? In the first step of the research, we conducted a bibliographical search on Scopus and Web of Science using such keywords as “earth observation systems”, “ecosystem service assessment”, and “tropical forest” and publication date within a range from 1997 till present. After additional filtration, the number of relevant publications was reduced from original 2334 to 347. In the next step, we apply the techniques of text mining to answer the above questions. The results will be discussed in our conference talk.