Germany lost almost 5% of its forest cover in the three years between January 2018 and April 2021, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) reported on Monday, citing satellite images. The DLR attributed the loss of around 501,000 hectares of woodland “primarily to unusually extreme periods of heat and drought in these years, which in turn favoured attack by harmful insects.” The DLR research group of the Earth Observation Center (EOC) in Oberpfaffenhofen made use of images taken by the Sentinel-2 satellite of the European Copernicus programme and the US satellite Landsat 8 to assess the loss. The su…