Anthropogenic and natural disturbances can impact vegetation type, structure and productivity. Essential climate variables (ECVs) such as leaf area index, fractional vegetation cover, and fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation enable quantification of status and trends of disturbed vegetation in a species and land cover independent manner. Site studies are often used to quantify the impact of site regeneration but are of limited use to quantify the regional cumulative effect of regeneration due to costs involved in large area sampling and the need to account for inter-annual and intra-annual variability in growing conditions. Here, we show a new globally applicable approach for monitoring of vegetation ECVs using free and open medium resolution multispectral satellite imagery. Implemented within the Natural Resources Canada Landscape Evolution and Forecasting (LEAF) Toolbox (https://github.com/rfernand387/LEAF-Toolbox) , this approach uses machine learning algorithms, calibrated using radiative transfer model simulations rather than empirical measurements, to efficiently map vegetation ECVs from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagers at continental scale (https://app.geo.ca/). The theoretical basis of LEAF algorithms and comprehensive global validation results, indicating uncertainty less than 20% and stability better than 2.5%/year, is presented. Implementations in both Google Earth Engine and open source STAC APIs for site specific sampling and Canada wide mapping are presented. In addition to an overview of Canada wide datasets, a case studies related to anthropogenic revegetation is conducted to test the hypothesis that revegetated sites attain similar vegetation density, cover and productivity as reference undisturbed sites. Time series of vegetation ECVs are extracted between 2014 to 2024 to quantify peak annual vegetation density, cover and potential productivity for 1000 forested reclamation sites in Alberta and 1000 afforestation sites in Ontario as well as similar undisturbed reclamation sites in each province. These comparisons are used to quantify the local and cumulative effects of regeneration practices on forest lands in southern Alberta and Ontario.