SEPAL: a powerful, open-source platform for forest and land monitoring
01/05/2022
SEPAL is a freely available, open-source, powerful computing platform...
SEPAL’s goals are to support countries in their efforts to halt tropical deforestation and degradation, and to enhance reforestation and restoration by:
- providing a free, easily accessible, powerful platform for efficient geospatial data access and customized processing;
- enhancing global capacity to operationally apply high-resolution satellite images to critical forest and land monitoring issues; and
- building country capacity in high-resolution satellite imagery applications for critical forest and land monitoring issues in response to domestic policy needs.
The project will directly benefit 64 countries through different capacity-building modalities toward autonomous use of the data for key forest and land monitoring needs. In addition, some countries will receive targeted support and commitment, leading to the institutionalization of data use at the national level, thus strengthening institutional arrangements and linkages to policy formulation, implementation and evaluation through capacity development at the national level.
Operationalizing and institutionalizing innovative technologies for using geospatial data is key to producing accurate, transparent information critical for reversing climate change, reducing deforestation and degradation, and catalysing restoration and conservation. The first phase of SEPAL was successfully carried out from 2016 to 2021 (see evaluation below), implemented by the Forestry Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and financed by an initial contribution from Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI). The second phase – Forest and Land Monitoring for Climate Action – is a four-year project that aims to improve climate change mitigation plans and create better informed land-use policies.
It is connected to modern geospatial data infrastructures, such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), further driving the generation of high-integrity forest and land-use data that enable countries to attract public and private carbon finance for forest-related climate action. SEPAL caters to specific monitoring and reporting needs through dedicated modules, such as SE.PLAN for spatially explicit forest restoration planning, SE.PAFE for monitoring fires in real-time, and BFAST-GPU for running dense, large-area, time-series analyses. SEPAL is based on the following key principles:
 | inclusiveness; |
 | data democratization; |
 | focus on results; |
 | attention to innovative technologies; and |
 | long-term sustainability. |
SEPAL contributes to:
- Better Environment of FAO’s Strategic Framework and Priority Areas: “Climate and agri-food systems” and “Biodiversity and Ecosystems”;
- Accelerators: Technology, Innovation, and Data;
- SDGs 15 Life on Land and 13 Climate Action;
- The implementation of the Paris Agreement; and
- The FAO’s Hand in Hand (HiH) Initiative.
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