Earth observation turns ecological targets into measurable outcomes

When the EU’s Nature Restoration Regulation entered into force in 2024, it set legally binding targets to restore degraded ecosystems across Europe. With National Restoration Plans due in September 2026, Member States face an urgent question: how can restoration be mapped, planned and monitored across millions of hectares in a consistent, verifiable way? Earth observation (EO) data – and very-high-resolution multispectral satellite imagery in particular – is increasingly the answer.

With 80% of European habitats in poor condition, the European Union’s Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR) aims to increase biodiversity, limiting climate change and reducing the impact of natural disasters. It not only introduces clear restoration targets, but also demands verifiable proof of progress. Each EU Member State must prepare a National Restoration Plan, describing where restoration will take place, how much area is involved, and how results will be measured. These plans are expected to include maps, indicators and timelines. The September 2026 deadline is approaching rapidly, and yet many ecosystems remain incompletely mapped and their ecological condition is poorly understood.

The value of EO data from baseline to reporting

The NRR follows a logical four-step process: understand the current situation, plan interventions, implement on the ground, and monitor results. At each stage, consistent and comparable data is essential. For many applications, medium-resolution satellite data from programmes such as Copernicus Sentinel-2 (10–60m resolution) provides a valuable baseline. However, the NRR sometimes requires finer spatial and spectral precision, in which case very-high-resolution (VHR) multispectral imagery at 30–50cm can provide the answer.

1. Building the knowledge base

Before restoration can begin, Member States must identify their ecosystems – how many, where, and in what condition they are. A lot of the data can be gained from satellite imagery. For example, 30cm images with eight spectral bands (provided in Europe by EUSI) can reveal vegetation health, soil moisture, water quality or carbon leaks. Archive imagery adds a further dimension. For example, it allows authorities to see how ecosystems have changed over time, which is essential when restoration requires re-establishing habitats that have been lost rather than simply improving those that remain.

2. Designing National Restoration Plans

Once a baseline is established, countries must decide where to act. National Restoration Plans must identify priority areas, describe measures and set timelines, all while balancing ecological, economic and social considerations. At this stage, spatial information becomes a decision-support tool. EO data allows authorities to compare candidate sites, identify constraints – such as land use conflicts or infrastructure proximity – and plan across regional boundaries.

3. Implementation on the ground

Restoration can take many forms: reconnecting rivers, restoring wetlands or introducing green infrastructure into urban areas. These actions are site-specific and often require detailed information that broad-scale mapping cannot provide. VHR satellite images reveal field-level features that matter, e.g. the precise location of river barriers, the extent of invasive species encroachment, or the condition of individual trees. Thanks to frequent revisits by satellites, rapidly shifting situations – such as wildfires – can be monitored closely as they evolve.

4. Monitoring and reporting

The NRR places strong emphasis on long-term monitoring. From 2028 onwards, Member States must report regularly. This creates a need for data that is not only accurate but also consistent over time.

Different ecosystems, different challenges

The actual role of EO in helping national governments to comply with the NRR varies depending on the type of ecosystem in question, since each one presents distinct monitoring challenges.

In the case of terrestrial, coastal and freshwater ecosystems, for example, EU Member States must ensure that at least 30% of degraded areas are under effective restoration by 2030 (rising to 90% by 2050). Despite these being vast, diverse and often fragmented landscapes, satellite data makes it possible to monitor vegetation dynamics, water regimes and ecosystem conditions at national scale. However, many habitats covered by the regulation are small and heterogenous. Wetlands, riparian corridors, coastal margins and fragmented grasslands may be too fine-scale to map accurately with 10–30m sensors. VHR imagery at 30-50cm captures such features with sufficient precision for both initial mapping and repeatable change detection, in line with the NRR’s requirements to identify degraded areas, prioritize restoration sites and document re-establishment.

When it comes to forest ecosystems, the NRR shifts the focus from simply restoring areas to improving ecological quality and resilience. Member States are required to demonstrate that forests are becoming more structurally diverse, better connected and storing more organic carbon, with measurable increases in deadwood. Authorities need to analyse not only where forests are, but also how they function and evolve over time. EO provides a scalable way forward. In Bulgaria, for example, remote sensing has been used to monitor bark beetle outbreaks in spruce forests, combining EUSI multispectral satellite imagery with indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to assess tree vitality and detect infestation patterns across large, mountainous areas. This approach made it possible to identify stressed and damaged forest stands, track the spread of infestations over time, and quantify changes in affected areas. It revealed a significant increase in bark beetle damage within the study site. Across the EU, similar approaches are expected to underpin national reporting on forest ecosystem condition under the NRR.

In agricultural areas, the NRR focuses on soil quality and landscape diversity. Member States must demonstrate improvement in at least two out of three indicators: grassland butterfly index, organic carbon in cropland mineral soils, and the share of agricultural land with high-diversity landscape features. Targets for farmland birds and drained peatlands add further complexity. VHR satellite data supports multiple aspects of this monitoring challenge, from mapping field boundaries and landscape features, to tracking seasonal vegetation patterns relevant to farmland biodiversity. Red, red-edge and infrared spectral bands can be used for crop species differentiation and plant health analysis, for example.

In terms of urban ecosystems, the NRR stipulates that Member States must stop the net loss of urban green space and tree canopy cover by 2030, and reverse the loss thereafter. For context, a study of 862 European cities found that fewer than 15% of urban residents live in accordance with the 3-30-300 rule – a principle that recommends three trees are visible from every home, every neighbourhood has 30% canopy cover, and people live within 300m of a high-quality green space. The advantage of EO in this scenario is that, unlike uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) sensors or aerial collections, satellite imagery strips are kilometres wide and can cover an entire city within a few passes. Various solutions are available to help authorities extract a detailed analysis of individual trees including information about tree species, health or size. According to case studies by Arboair, a Swedish software company specializing in AI and remote sensing solutions for tree management, satellite-based analysis of urban trees reduces the cost and time involved in building a tree inventory to €5 and three minutes per tree versus €15 and 15 minutes in traditional field surveys.

In the context of waterways, the NRR sets the goal of restoring 25,000km of free-flowing rivers throughout the EU by 2030. To achieve this, Member States are required to create a complete inventory of artificial barriers to river connectivity and identify which should be removed. To make this decision, authorities need to know which ones are needed for flood protection and which have other uses. EO can partly provide the answer, since VHR satellite data supports detection and mapping of barriers such as weirs and dams, terrain analysis for flood modelling, and pre- and post-intervention monitoring of river morphology and floodplain vegetation. These insights help determine where interventions will have the greatest effect, and time-series analysis documents how river systems respond after the barrier removal.

The NRR also targets specific marine habitats such as seagrass meadows, macroalgal forests and sedimentary beds. The effectiveness of satellite imagery for monitoring such ecosystems depends strongly on water depth, clarity and habitat type. In coastal and shallow marine environments, multispectral data is highly valuable. It can map and monitor seagrass extent, macroalgae, sediment plumes and coastal water quality, all of which are directly linked to ecosystem condition and restoration success. Additionally, spectral ratios involving the yellow bands – such as Yellow/NIR2 – show strong correlation with measured water depths, supporting effective bathymetric modelling and monitoring of shallow water bodies.

Turning observations into information

The value of satellite data lies in how it is processed, interpreted and integrated with other data sources. The NRR requires indicators that are comparable across Member States and consistent across reporting periods. These requirements place significant demands on the analytical frameworks built around EO data.

In most applications, satellite imagery needs to be combined with field observations, habitat classifications and ancillary spatial data to produce the necessary indicators. The quality and resolution of the underlying imagery determine what is detectable and what is not: whether a small wetland is mappable, whether a hedgerow can be distinguished from a field boundary, or whether a gradual shift in vegetation condition constitutes a measurable change. The precision of these outputs increases significantly when VHR eight-band data is available. Classification accuracy improves, smaller features become mappable and the uncertainty associated with change detection decreases. For a regulation whose targets are legally binding and subject to international scrutiny, this increase in data quality translates directly into more defensible reporting against the NRR’s legally binding targets.

Conclusion

The EU's Nature Restoration Regulation sets clear ecosystem recovery targets that require Member States to know where to restore, how to prioritize investment, and how to demonstrate results over time. The success of meeting these targets depends on access to accurate, consistent, and spatially detailed information. Earth observation provides a highly efficient way to monitor change at scale, especially when using very high resolution satellite imagery, such as that provided by EUSI, to capture the fine level of detail needed for specific restoration-related features.

Moreover, the NRR introduces a long-term monitoring obligation that is different from the occasional mapping projects that have characterized much environmental assessment to date. This shift is likely to reshape how EO services are used. Rather than one-off mapping campaigns, public authorities will need long-term access to regularly updated imagery and derived products such as consistent time series and national-scale datasets. The integration of different data sources – VHR commercial imagery, medium-resolution public data from Copernicus, field survey results and in-situ sensors – will become routine, and the geospatial sector is well placed to support this transition.

Further reading

European Commission, Nature Restoration Regulation, https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/nature-restoration-regulation_en

European Space Imaging, Enhancing land cover mapping with 8-band satellite imagery, https://www.euspaceimaging.com/wp-content/uploads/Enhancing-Land-Cover-Mapping-with-8-Band-Satellite-Imagery-Nov-2025-Digital-compressed.pdf

European Parliament and Council of the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 of 24 June 2024 on nature restoration and amending Regulation (EU) 2022/869, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX%3A32024R1991

European Space Imaging, Detecting bark beetle damage in Bulgaria, https://www.euspaceimaging.com/blog/2022/03/31/detecting-bark-beetle-damage-in-bulgaria/

Joint Research Centre, Urban green spaces are scarce, while climate and wealth impact access, https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/urban-green-spaces-are-scarce-while-climate-and-wealth-impact-access-2026-04-13_en