Building strong ties to support forests

Collect Earth Online (CEO) and SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring) are part of cutting-edge suite of platforms to interpret satellite data, generate land cover and land use change maps, calculate land change area, and estimate activity data. Countries use these capabilities for their National Forest Monitoring Systems (NFMS) – not least to help them access carbon finance and meeting reporting requirements on climate change and sustainable development goals. They are also used to monitor deforestation and forest degradation caused by illegal mining, agriculture, and forestry.

Both platforms are within the OpenForis Initiative. Most of the technical pathways used for capacity building and setup and maintaining NFMS use the OpenForis suite of tools. This includes over 90% of country submissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change!

Developers from the two teams in the Open Foris Initiative are attending a training workshop in Rome at FAO’s headquarters from November 7th through 15th, 2023. The two teams are using this opportunity to build closer programmatic relationships between CEO and SEPAL, so users can more easily transport data between the platforms. For example, maps created in SEPAL are used to create sampling designs that are used in CEO, and CEO datasets are used as training and validation data in SEPAL.

This workshop takes place in the context of AIM4Forests and the Forest Data Partnership. Creating closer ties between CEO and SEPAL will facilitate scaling-up and sharing processing flows, helping to achieve goals of reducing deforestation and forest degradation, restoring forests, and sustainably managing forests.

CEO would like to thank its ongoing funders FAO, NASA–USAID SERVIR, and SilvaCarbon, a US government program. Thanks also to CEO’s technology partners: Norway’s International Climate & Forests Initiative for funding open high-resolution data availability; Planet for providing high-resolution imagery; and the Google Earth Engine team for creating a platform for Earth science data and analysis.

Collect Earth Online is working constantly to improve the user experience, and your feedback is invaluable. If you have ideas to share, please write to support@collect.earth.

Thank you!