Results

The tool and main features

The operational version of the vegetation monitoring tool can be found on https://vegetatiemonitor.netlify.com/#/verken (in Dutch), best used in the Chromium or Google Chrome browsers. The main screen shows the satellite image layer, the legal vegetation map, the classified satellite image, and the comparison map, see Figure 4 and Table 2. The time-slider allows selecting pre-classified year maps or dates of sentinel-2 images that can be classified on the fly of any area of interest. Classifications can be downloaded in geotiff for GIS analysis.
After classification (day or year), a land cover pie chart of clicked upon individual cadastral polygons can be made and compared to the ‘allowed’ distribution. The sentinel-2 images available in the daily analysis- mode are updated every night with the most recently available images and allow for the inspection of the current situation (provided clouds do not cover the area of interest). In the top bar, users can switch to a lightweight field (‘veld’ in Dutch) version of the tool showing GPS location from smartphone or tablet to aid field visits.