## 1 Introduction  
At the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in 2021, world leaders endorsed the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use, which has the goal of halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. [PERSON] et al. [1] identify the expansion of farmland in the tropics as the primary cause of deforestation worldwide and review its effects and control strategies. To create transparency on the deforestation impacts of supply chains, large trading blocks, including the US, EU, and UK, are in the process of introducing legislation to tackle deforestation in food supply chains that will place due diligence requirements on various supply chain actors trading in certain deforestation related commodities [2, 3, 4]. The European Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on an EU Regulation on deforestation-free supply chains on 6 December 2022 [2]. On 29 June 2023, the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EU) 2023/1115 entered into force. It aims to ensure that certain key goods on the EU single market will no longer contribute to deforestation and forest degradation. All relevant companies have to conduct strict due diligence if they import or export any product from the following list to/from the EU single market: palm oil, cattle, soy, coffee, cocoa, timber, and rubber as well as derived products such as beef, furniture, or chocolate [2]. Any trader wishing to sell listed commodities on the EU single market or export from within it must prove that the products do not originate from recently deforested land or have contributed to forest degradation. Due to the inaccessibility and cost of inspecting distant and often large forest areas through field visits to meet the due diligence requirements of importers and exporters, Earth observation (EO) from space is required to allow companies to demonstrate that they meet the EU Deforestation Regulation. Ideally, businesses want to receive information on any possible violation of their zero-deforestation policies in source regions for these products as soon as practicable, so they can intervene in deforestation and degradation in a timely manner. Hence, near-real-time EO data streams from operational satellite missions can provide solutions towards enabling such a due diligence system. In addition to legislative pressures, commodity traders, retailers and brands are voluntarily making deforestation-free commitments with their products and seeking to verify these claims. Accurate, scalable solutions are required to assist companies in removing deforestation from their supply chains both to meet these commitments and to assist in corporate responsibility reporting more broadly. A number of different solutions towards operational deforestation monitoring have been developed [5; 6; 7]. Strictly speaking, EO provides only information on the loss of tree cover, but not on deforestation as defined in international laws. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has a definition of deforestation that was adopted in 2001 by its Conference of the Parties (COP) 7 (11/CP.7). According to the UNFCCC (Decision 11/CP.7, 2001), deforestation is 'the direct human-induced conversion of forested land to non-forested land' [8]. This definition implies that the conversion of forested land to non-forested land must be human induced. It excludes natural disturbances, for example. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in the same year, defined deforestation as 'The conversion of forest to another land use or the long-term reduction of the tree canopy cover below the minimum 10 percent threshold' [8]. The inclusion of a minimum tree canopy cover is appealing from an operational point of view, but the 10 percent tree cover threshold is not universally accepted in national forest definitions--there is in fact a huge spread of definitions [9].