🔥 On May 21, 2025, another meeting of the discussion platform “Science for Recovery and Sustainability” took place, dedicated to the topic “Changing Landscapes: Nighttime Lighting and Fires in Conflict Zones.”
👨💻 The invited speaker was Mikhail Zhizhin, PhD in Computational Seismology and Image Recognition, Research Associate at the Payne Institute. He presented a study on how satellite technologies help track environmental and socio-economic changes during armed conflicts.
🚀 In the context of military conflicts, it becomes possible to detect significant events in real time—such as explosions of warehouses or chemical facilities—by observing their development overnight thanks to multiple satellite passes. Nighttime lighting analysis allows for assessing the impact of conflict on infrastructure and populations, although distinguishing between natural lighting fluctuations and war-induced changes remains a complex task, especially during short-term blackouts.
The research also covers monitoring the situation in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, as well as analyzing conflicts in Gaza and Sudan, demonstrating the universal applicability of the developed methods for assessing the consequences of armed conflicts.
🙌 We sincerely thank all participants for the active discussion!
🎥 If you missed it, the recording is available here.