Is SWOT able to detect deforestation?

The SWOT mission was initially launched to provide a continuous spatio-temporal monitoring of water levels over ocean and land. Here, we showed that SWOT data are also sensitive to land-use changes such as the opening of deforestation fronts mainly along communication routes, new deforestation roads as well as agricultural plot boundaries and road networks in three areas of the Pacific coast of Ecuador. The SWOT detections were classified according to their type using a leaning machine model (SVM). These detections were then compared with reference land-use maps from the Ecuadorian Ministry of the Environment, using a confusion matrix. One of the perspectives of this study will be to compare these detections to other change detection products such as Global Forest Change and to the results obtained with other change detection algorithms such as CuSum. Our study shows that SWOT's observations enable the various forms of deforestation to be monitored recently.