Participatory assessment of forest area and its changes through innovative data collection techniques

A six days national training workshop is being organized in Dehradun, Uttrakhand from 11-16 March 2019 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Forest Survey of India (FSI) for the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 (FRA 2020).

This workshop is part of a participatory global exercise, which will bring together FAO and national experts around the world to implement a global Remote Sensing Survey. The survey is conducted by FAO’s Forestry Department. 

The training will develop national experts’ capacities to use remote sensing in order to assess forest area and its changes through innovative data collection techniques. In particular, it will assist the participants in the interpretation of satellite images and in the production of accurate and comparable data following an internationally agreed methodology and classification.  The national workshop is attended by FSI’s Technical officers arriving from most parts of the country and its main objective is to complete the collection of data for all the global samples falling within India. The interpretation of the samples will be done by using the open-source software Collect Earth Online, which is part of FAO’s Open Foris suite of tools, and developed by NASA and FAO with Google’s support.

During the opening ceremony, FAO Forestry Officer, Mr Adolfo Kindgard remarked that “This workshop contributes to the global assessment FAO is conducting. Thanks to the Forest Survey of India and the contribution of participating experts from each zone, we will be able to collect accurate data on the land use and its changes for this global exercise”.

The workshop will contribute to improved global and regional estimates on forest cover and its changes and therefore also to the monitoring of progress towards the sustainable development goals of Agenda 2030. The workshop was made possible by the financial support received from the European Commission.