Direct and indirect factors, such as habitat loss, landscape degradation, fire, soil erosion, anthropogenic activities, demographics, and climate change threaten and lead to a decline in biodiversity levels. Cost-efficient biodiversity monitoring systems are therefore needed for identifying the location and magnitude of changes in order to prevent or mitigate losses and enhance the resilience capacity of protected areas through appropriate conservation measures.
The aim of this work is the development of a cloud-based Earth Observation Data Cube (EODC) for monitoring anthropogenic changes and pressures on Natura 2000 sites (EO Natura EODCs), serving as a key tool for their rational management and protection. EODCs have emerged as a promising solution for the efficient management of Earth Observation Big Data generated by satellites, which are provided through open access from various data repositories.
The EO Natura EODC is built using the Open Data Cube (ODC) framework, exploiting the availability of no-cost Sentinel-2 imagery. The EO Natura EODC is provided using Amazon Web Services (AWSs) cloud-based services and infrastructure, e.g. Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), EC2 Instances, S3 Buckets, Application Load Balancer (ALB), Amazon Cognito. Specialized Python scripts using the Open Data Cube (ODC) and the xcube open-source software packages/toolkits have been developed to provide EO data in an analysis-ready form to users, simplifying access, processing, and visualization of EO data. Moreover, flexible containerized applications utilize open-source platforms like Docker and Apache Airflow to serve user-friendly and secure interfaces to end users and administrators, facilitating the authoring, scheduling, and monitoring of necessary workflows. Two information extraction pipelines based on Change Vector Analysis for exploring the EO Natura EODC infrastructure have been developed and validated for monitoring open quarry activity and wildfire perimeters at a regional scale.
