A standardized benchmarking exercise evaluating operational remote sensing workflows across European forests.
Context & Objectives
While a wide array of near-real-time (NRT) forest change-detection systems exists, evaluating their operational efficacy remains difficult due to divergent validation protocols and fragmented study areas. To address these challenges, the JRC convened members of the remote sensing land mapping community for an expert meeting on March 3, 2026. The core concept of this intercomparison challenge was pitched during the event and subsequently discussed and refined collectively with the participants. As a result of this co-design process, the initiative now establishes a common, transparent benchmarking framework to systematically assess the strengths and limitations of current methodologies across the European continent.
International research teams and algorithm developers are invited to run their processing workflows across a standardized assessment period. By centralizing validation against a common benchmark reference dataset, this challenge moves past self-reported accuracy boundaries to assess NRT disturbance monitoring capabilities for European forests in a rigorous, transparent and interoperable way.
This challenge is part of the European Commission's forest science partnership that aims to support the development of new forest indicators based on remote sensing.
Rules of Engagement
Strict Structural Constraint: Honest Online Simulation
All submissions must operate strictly as true "online" recursive processing pipelines. When processing an observation at timestamp , models must evaluate that data point using only historical or concurrent data ( ). Systems are strictly prohibited from utilizing retroactive smoothing, multi-pass processing, or future look-aheads ( ) to refine breakpoint dates or filter false positives.
The benchmarking window focuses on the historical year 2022. While multi-year historical time series are provided to build stable baseline states, the target disturbance flags must be generated dynamically as individual observations become available.
To keep the computational footprint accessible, results only need to be produced for the 100 designated
Primary Sampling Units (PSUs). Participants are not expected or required to run their algorithms wall-to-wall across the entire European continent.
Submit your work before January 31st, 2027.