b0cde5a8-5d07-44c2-9293-cb1316dfd76a 1.0 Alvar: Ailanthus altissima visual aid for reconnaissance 2025-11-21 Alvar is a Google Earth Engine cloud application for early reconnaissance of Ailanthus altissima. Alvar is based on Copernicus Sentinel-2 optical imagery at 10m ground pixel resolution. The service rationale is that each plant species shows peculiar signals in the optical range and, possibly, time-series signatures. Hence, recognising the invasive alien species A. altissima is in principle feasible, given a characteristic optical spatiotemporal signature. However, even if we can have physiological clues, we do not know such a signature. Alvar supports the search and reconnaissance of A. altissima optical signature exploiting the cloud computing capability of fast time series search of the images and the vegetation-related associated optical indices, without the need for local data download. Alvar exploits the machine learning algorithms exposed by the Google Earth Engine APIs and trains them by means of a user-provided training/control set of empirical observations. The user interface is GUI-based and the intervention on the code consists only in importing the appropriate training set and tuning the area of interest bounding box accordingly. Marco Ciolfi National Research Council (CNR), Research Institute on Terrestrial Ecosystems (IRET) marco.ciolfi@cnr.it v.1.0 https://metadatacatalogue.lifewatch.eu/srv/api/records/b0cde5a8-5d07-44c2-9293-cb1316dfd76a/attachments/thumbnail_img%201.png thumbnail_img 1.png https://metadatacatalogue.lifewatch.eu/srv/api/records/b0cde5a8-5d07-44c2-9293-cb1316dfd76a/attachments/remote%20sensing.jpg remote sensing.jpg e-Service invasive alien species identification Sentinel-2 cloud computing environmental monitoring habitat mapping remote sensing GNU GPL-3.0 Users must be logged as Google developers in order to use the application. https://code.earthengine.google.com/baf3e4144da52ed4e372f6991ca17bf6 URL Alvar service https://doi.org/10.48372/w78z-7c80 DOI DOI Aalto: Sample training set for Ailanthus altissima visual aid reconnaissance https://data.lifewatchitaly.eu/handle/123456789/326276 The Aalto shapefile consists in a set of training and control points to train different classification algorithms provided by Google Engine. The Alvar and Aalto pair is meant to be a minumim working example for training and classifications. Users can operate with their own datasets, following the simple class and type structure of the Aalto file. The Alvar script produces a map of potential sites infested by the invasive species Ailanthus altissima. This result is computed based on a traning set (Aalto shapefile) containing information about infested / not-infested areas (sampling sites) and a similar control set to assess the accuracy of the classification. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17672767 data processing The service was developed within the USEit project: https://www.lifewatchitaly.eu/en/pg-related-projects/useit/ Free https://training.lifewatchitaly.eu/resources/?resource=/course/view.php?id=214 https://training.lifewatchitaly.eu:9001/pluginfile.php/2473/mod_resource/content/1/ManualeUso_ALVAR.pdf