FAO empowers East Africa forestry experts to monitor changes in forest cover, land use
Forestry experts from across East Africa are meeting this week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to develop the region’s capability to monitor changes in forest cover and land use. The six-day Remote Sensing Survey Workshop for East African countries is being organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as part of the ongoing Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 (FRA 2020).
The workshop is expected to develop regional capacities in the utilization of the participatory FRA 2020 Remote Sensing methodology. Participants will be trained in visual image interpretation, and each of them will collect data for at least 250 Remote Sensing Survey samples within their territory.
Taking into account recent developments
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Valeria Contessa, Geospatial specialist at FAO, said, “The recent rapid development of affordable cloud-based solutions for storing, accessing and analyzing remote sensing data and products have drastically facilitated remote sensing based assessments even in developing countries with low technical capacity and computing infrastructure”.
“It also comes at a time when these solutions can play an important role in improving the national, regional and global data bases on forest and land resources as well as their changes and facilitate monitoring progress towards several SDGs,” Valeria added.
The data collection will be carried out using Collect Earth Online tool developed in collaboration with NASA and Google and tailored for FRA 2020 Remote Sensing Survey purposes.
Forestry experts from Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda are attending the workshop.
RFA relevancy
The Global Forest Resources Assessment FRA 2020 Remote Sensing Survey Workshop for East African countries is one of the approximately 30 workshops organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in collaboration with its partners, which will train, in total, about 600 country experts in remote sensing and visual interpretation of satellite imagery.
FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) is a country driven process of collection and analysis of official national statistics on forest resources for all the countries and territories of the world. The FRA data are gathered through a global network of officially nominated National Correspondents.
Combining their knowledge of forest resources in their countries with data from remote sensing and other sources, allows FAO to provide a global dataset of information on over sixty variables covering all aspects of sustainable forest management. This information can be used to draw up recommendations for governments, civil society and the private sector.
FAO is conducting the Global Remote Sensing Survey to enhance countries capacity to use the latest technology in their own assessments as well as to generate independent, robust and consistent regional and global estimates of forest area and its changes over time.