Treesearch

The Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) was established by GEO in 2011, to assist countries to produce reliable, consistent reports on change in forest cover and forest use, and associated anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

For purposes of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) accounting, estimation of deforestation area in tropical countries often relies on satellite remote sensing in the absence of National Forest Inventories (NFI). Gabon has recently launched a National Climate Action Plan with the intent of establishing a National Forest Monitoring System that meets the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2006 guidelines for the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector. The assessment of areas of forest cover and forest cover change is essential to estimate activity data, defined as...

We report on the operational use of remotely sensed data by national forest inventory (NFI) programmes in 45 countries representing approximately 65% of theworld's forest area. The analysis is based on responses to a questionnaire prepared under the auspices of COST Action FP1001 "Improving Data and Information on the Potential Supply of Wood Resources: A European Approach from Multisource National Forest Inventories (USEWOOD)". Responses were received from NFI remote sensing experts from both European and non-European countries. Three major conclusions were drawn from the study: (1)...

In May 2014, the Member States of the United Nations adopted Resolution 23/1 on “strengthening a targeted crime prevention and criminal justice response to combat illicit trafficking in forest products, including timber.” The resolution promotes the development of tools and technologies that can be used to combat the illicit trafficking of timber. Stopping illegal logging worldwide could substantially increase revenue from the legal trade in timber and halt the associated environmental degradation, but law enforcement and timber traders themselves are hampered by the lack of available...

Carbon accounting is at the heart of efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. One approach for estimating population parameters for live tree stem carbon entails three primary steps: (1) construction of an individual tree, allometric carbon model, (2) application of the model to tree-level data for a probability sample of plots, and (3) use of a probability-based (design-based) estimator of mean carbon per unit area for a population of interest. Compliance with the IPCC good practice guidance requires satisfaction of two criteria, one related to minimizing bias and one related to...

Remotely sensed data have been widely used in recent years for mapping and estimating biomass. However, the characterization of the uncertainty of mapped or estimated biomass in previous studies was either based on adhoc approaches (e.g., using model fitting statistics such root mean square errors derived frompurposive samples) or mostly limited to the analysis of mean biomass for the whole study area. This study proposed a novel uncertainty analysis method that can characterize biomass uncertainty across multiple spatial scales and multiple spatial resolutions. The uncertainty analysis...

Forest structural diversity plays a major role for forest management, conservation and restoration and is recognized as a fundamental aspect of forest biodiversity. The assessment, maintenance and restoration of a diversified forest structure have become major foci in the effort to preserve forest ecosystems from loss of biological diversity. However, the assessment of forest biodiversity is difficult because it involves multiple components and is characterized using multiple variables. The objective of the study was to develop a methodological approach for predicting, mapping, and...

Estimation of wood volume and biomass is an important assignment of any National Forest Inventory. However, the estimation process is often expensive, laborious and sometimes imprecise because of small sample sizes relative to population variability. Remote sensing techniques are an option to assist in surveying large areas by providing data that can be related to the forest attribute of interest through mathematical models of relationships. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is a technology that can provide data that are closely related to forest wood volume and biomass. With these data,...

Fire refugia, sometimes referred to as fire islands, shadows, skips, residuals, or fire remnants, are an important element of the burn mosaic, but we lack a quantitative framework that links observations of fire refugia from different environmental contexts. Here, we develop and test a conceptual model for how predictability of fire refugia varies according to topographic complexity and fire weather conditions. Refugia were quantified as areas unburned or burned at comparatively low severity based on remotely sensed burn severity data. We assessed the relationship between refugia and a...

The k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) technique is a popular method for producing spatially contiguous predictions of forest attributes by combining field and remotely sensed data. In the framework of Working Group 2 of COST Action FP1001, we reviewed the scientific literature for forestry applications of k-NN. Information available in scientific publications on this topic was used to populate a database that was then used as the basis for a meta-analysis. We extracted qualitative and quantitative information from 260 experimental tests described in 148 scientific papers. The papers represented a...