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Environmental activist Leonidas Nzigiyimpa says “you can’t manage what you don’t know. “
He adds: “For the forest scenario, we want to use new technologies.
Mr. Nzigiyimpa is the lead custodian of five forest spaces in the small Central African country of Burundi.
For more than two decades, he and his team have worked with local communities to manage the forest. His face lights up when he describes the new smell and good looks of the place. “It’s natural nature,” he says.
In carrying out his work, Mr. Nzigiyimpa will need to take into account a variety of factors, ranging from tracking the influence of human movements and economies to tracking biodiversity and the influence of climate change, staffing and budgets.
To track and record all this, you now use the latest edition of a free software called Integrated Management Effectiveness Tool.
The tool evolved in particular for these environmental paintings through a task called Biopama (Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management Program). This initiative has the support of the European Union and the 79 Member States of the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.
“So we use this kind of tool to exercise managers to use it to collect smart data and analyze that data, to make smart decisions,” says Mr. Nzigiyimpa.
Monitoring and protecting the world’s forests is not only vital for the local communities and economies most directly affected. Deforestation contributes to climate change, so forest recovery can combat it.
Some 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of the world’s forests are lost each year, according to the United Nations.
This deforestation accounts for 20% of all global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature, which adds that “by reducing forest loss, we can reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. “
In a bid to repair the world’s forests and other grassy habitats, the United Nations last year introduced the United Nations Decade for Ecosystem Restoration. This has noted that countries, corporations and other organizations promise movements to prevent, prevent and oppose the degradation of ecosystems around the world.
“But saying we’re going to repair is not enough,” said Yelena Finegold, head of forestry at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). “There is a desire to responsibly plan how the recovery of this ecosystem will occur, followed through movements in the soil that became imaginable through investments in recovery and tracking systems in a position to track the recovery of this ecosystem. “
This increased forest control has resulted in new virtual teams to collect, classify and use data to a greater extent.
One of them is the FAO Ecosystem Monitoring Framework (Ferm) website. The site was introduced last year and uses satellite imagery to highlight adjustments in forests around the world. Maps and knowledge are available to all Internet users, whether they are scientists, public officials, a company or a member of the public.
A key source of knowledge for Ferm is the American company NASA and its Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation system. Known as Gedi for short, this acronym is pronounced like the word Jedi from the Star Wars movies. And continuing with the theme of this series of films, its motto is “may the forest be with you”.
The generation itself is indeed a very science fiction reality. “We fired laser beams at trees from the International Space Station,” says Laura Duncanson, who helps lead Gedi’s assignment in the Department of Geographic Sciences at the University of Marylands.
“We use reflected energy to map forests in 3D, adding their height, canopy density and carbon content,” adds Dr. Duncanson, who is a leading remote sensing expert. “This is an exciting new generation because for decades we’ve been practicing deforestation from space, but now, with Gedi, we can calculate carbon emissions related to forest loss [for greater accuracy]. “
Maps and knowledge are also provided to Ferm through the Norwegian company Planet Labs, which operates more than two hundred satellites equipped with cameras. They take some 350 million photographs of the Earth’s surface daily, covering a domain of one square kilometer.
Planet Labs can also be contracted through governments and corporations around the world. In addition to tracking forests, its cameras can be used to check everything from droughts to agricultural, energy and infrastructure projects, and monitor key infrastructure, such as ports.
Remi D’Annunzio, an FAO forestry colleague, says all the available photographs of the area “have greatly replaced the way we monitor forests, as they have produced incredibly reproducible observations and revisits of incredibly common places. “
He adds: “Basically now, with all the publicly available satellites combined, we can get a complete snapshot of the Earth every four or five days. “
Pilot projects in Vietnam and Laos that seek to combat illegal logging are examples of how all of Ferm’s near-real-time tracking is being used. Rangers and network staff on the floor receive alerts on their cell phones when additional deforestation is detected.
“Now, what we are looking to do is not only to perceive the volume of forests that are being lost, but where they are lost in particular in this or that district, so that we can monitor the loss and even save it in an almost genuine time, from getting worse,” says Akiko Inoguchi, FAO’s forestry officer.