New remote sensing developments for forest monitoring at Global Landscapes Forum
At the Global Landscape Forum over the weekend the World Resources Institute (WRI) launched several new initiatives of Global Forest Watch (GFW).
From left to right: Matthew Hansen, University of Maryland; Sassan Saatchi, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Nigel Sizer, World Resources Institute (WRI); Alessandro Baccini, Woods Hole Research Center; Fred Stolle, WRI; Louis Reymondin, International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
One of these is the incorporation of CIAT’s Terra-I into the GFW platform (see here for more details). Louis Reymondin spoke at the launch event showing an example of the use of Terra-I in Peru. Terra-I will expand to the entire tropics in 2015. Matthew Hansen of the University of Maryland discussed the planned incorporation of Landsat-based alerts at higher temporal resolutions. New products estimating terrestrial carbon stocks are coming soon from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Woods Hole Research Center, announced respectively by Sassan Saatchi and Alessandro Baccini. All these developments point to more robust global monitoring efforts that will increase capacities to monitor and evaluate changes in vegetation at global scale. Several panelists here at the Global Landscapes Forum pointed out the tremendous progress made over the last five years. The announcements yesterday suggest that the pace of innovation in monitoring forest change with remote sensing is likely to increase even more during the next five.
Original post in : http://dapa.ciat.cgiar.org/ (December 08, 2014).
New remote sensing developments for forest monitoring at Global Landscapes Forum.
The Terra-i team together with CRS El Salvador under the Raices project carried out a virtual workshop through the teams platform to technicians from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, CARITAS, Universidad El Salvador, CENTA, about the Mapping of land cover using remote sensors and open source tools such as GEE, SEPAL and QGIS- Plugin Semi Automatic Classification.
Near real-time vegetation loss detection in Southwestern Ethiopia: calibration, validation, and implementation of the Terra-i system
The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (the Alliance) conducted a training for local stakeholders on the use of Terra-i as part of the collaboration with the Netherlands Development Organisation – SNV in the Coffee Agroforestry and Forest Enhancement for REDD+ (CAFÉ-REDD) Project.
From May 8-12, 2017, the Terra-i team, together with staff from the DGOTA of Peru's Ministry of Environment, carried out the first field validation of vegetative land cover changes detected during Terra-i monitoring for 2016 and 2017, using the technology UAV. This work was carried out under the framework of the project “Sustainable Amazonian Landscapes”. The team carried out over-flights with a Phantom 3 advanced rotor drone and a fixed-wing Ebee drone in seven townships of Yurimaguas. The objective of this work was to recognize the dynamics of land cover and land use changes in the region while at the same time to validate the accuracy of the detections of forest loss being monitored by Terra-i in Yurimaguas.
The Terra-i team has worked hard on renovating Terra-i’s website since early this year. A set of new features on the website provides interactive contents and facilitates adaptation to the mobile devices of our users. The fresh website was developed using the latest update of an open-source, Java-based web system, Magnolia CMS 5.4.4. This update was customized to add different categories of interaction such as news, vegetation cover changes, and information, among others.
Globally more than 1 billion people depend on forests for their livelihoods. Forests play a crucial role in climate regulation, ecosystem services provision and regulation, water supply, carbon storage and many other functions that support biodiversity. Currently the global rate of deforestation is substantial, and there is a growing need for timely, spatially explicit data that flag natural vegetation changes due to human activities.
The latest update of Terra-i has been used with the Co$ting Nature ecosystem services assessment tool to understand the impacts of recent forest loss in Colombia on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
During the 1st and 12th of June 2015, the Terra-i team, together with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP) and the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina (VLIR-UNALM), conducted the second field validation of the data produced by the Terra-I system. This time, the study area was the Yurimaguas district, Alto Amazonas province, Loreto region (Peru). We used information on populated places, main roads, rivers and information on land cover changes detected for 2013, 2014 and 2015 to define the 65 sampling points (or Terra-I pixels) for the validation process (Figure 1).