For accurate crop classification, it is necessary to use time-series of high-resolution satellite data to better discriminate among certain crop types. This task brings the following challenges: a large amount of satellite data for download, Big data processing and computational resources for utilization of state-of-the-art classification approaches. For solving these problems, we have developed an automated crop classification workflow, which is based on machine-learning techniques. By deployment of the workflow on the cloud platform, we can overcome challenges of Big data downloading and processing. In this paper, we present the system architecture and describe the experiments on structural and parametric identification of machine learning models utilized in the system.

Ukraine is an associate member of the European Union, and in the coming years, it is expected that all the data and services already used by European Union countries will become available for Ukraine. An important program, which is the basis for building European monitoring services for smart cities, is the Copernicus program. The two most important services of this program are the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). CLMS provides important information on land use in Europe. In the context of smart cities, the most valuable tool is the Urban Atlas service, which is related to local CLMS services and provides a detailed digital city plan in vector form, which is segmented into small functional areas classified by Coordinate Information on the Environment (CORINE) nomenclature. The Urban Atlas is a geospatial layer with high resolution, built for all European cities with a population of more than 100,000. It combines high-resolution satellite data, city segmentation by blocks and functional urban areas (FUAs), important city infrastructure, etc. This product is used as a basis for city planning and obtaining analytics on the most important indicators of city development, including air quality monitoring. For Ukraine, such geospatial products are not provided under the Copernicus program. In this article, FUAs are developed for Ukrainian cities using European technology. It is important to start work on this program’s implementation as early as possible so that when the first city atlas appears, Ukraine will be ready to work with it together with the European community. This requires preparing the basis for national research and training national stakeholders and consumers to use this product. To make this happen, it is necessary to have a national geospatial product that can be used as an analogue of the city atlas. In this article, the authors analyzed the existing methods of air quality assessment and the Global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 11.6.2, “Annual mean levels of fine particulate matter (e.g., PM_2.5 and PM₁₀) in cities (population weighted)”, achieved for European cities. Based on this, indicator 11.6.2 was then evaluated for the first time in Ukraine, considering the next 5 years. For the correct use of global products for Ukraine, CAMS global satellite data and population data (Global Human Settlement Layer and NASA population data) for Ukrainian cities were validated. These studies showed a statistically significant result and, therefore, demonstrated that global products can be used to monitor air quality both at the city level and for Ukraine as a whole. The obtained results were analyzed, and the values of indicator 11.6.2 for Ukraine were compared with those for other European countries.

Fire is one of the most common disturbances in natural ecosystems. The analysis of various sources of information (official and unofficial) about the fires in Ukraine (2019–2020) showed a lack of timely and reliable information. Satellite observation is of crucial importance to provide accurate, reliable, and timely information. This paper aims to modify the index of fire danger of a forest’s FWI by increasing its precision, based on the use of higher spatial resolution satellite data. A modification of the FWI method involves the utilization of the soil moisture deficit, in addition to the six subindices of the FWI system. In order to calculate the subindices values, weather data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service were used. Soil moisture deficit is calculated using Sentinel-1 radar satellite data on the water saturation degree of the soil surface layer and geospatial parameters from the 3D Soil Hydraulic Database of Europe. The application of the proposed methodology using the specified satellite, weather, and geospatial data makes it possible to assess fire danger on a continental scale with a spatial resolution of 250 m, 1 km, and a daily temporal resolution. Validation of the proposed method for modifying the FWI system demonstrates an improvement in the precision and relevance of fire danger prediction.

Wildfires cause extensive damage, but their rapid detection and cause assessment remains challenging. Existing methods utilize satellite data to map burned areas and meteorological data to model fire risk, but there are no information technologies to determine fire causes. It is crucially important in Ukraine to assess the losses caused by the military actions. This study proposes an integrated methodology and a novel framework integrating burned area mapping from Sentinel-2 data and fire risk modeling using the Fire Potential Index (FPI) in Google Earth Engine. The methodology enables efficient national-scale burned area detection and automated identification of anthropogenic fires in regions with low fire risk. Implemented over Ukraine, 104.229 ha were mapped as burned during July 2022, with fires inconsistently corresponding to high FPI risk, indicating predominantly anthropogenic causes.

Ukraine is on the verge of the land market opening. This process should begin in 2020, when free sale of land will be introduced. Now, only the land lease is officially allowed. To ensure transparency, equity and reliability of this process, objective information on real land use and its history, crop development state in each vegetation season is required. All these indicators significantly affect the market value of the land. However, there is no publicly available system in Ukraine with information on real land use and landowners. This information is only contained in the state cadaster system, which contains a lot of incorrect information, since land ownership acts were generated chiefly manually. These mistakes became obvious after the digitation process of state cadaster. Therefore, creation of the legal, technical and legislative prerequisites for the land market opening becomes an extremely important task, as well as the development of geospatial information system of real land use in Ukraine. The World Bank program "Supporting Transparent Land Governance in Ukraine" with financial support from the EU is aimed to address these issues.