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Forest monitoring provides the information countries need to make informed policy and management decisions, as well as meet international climate commitments. For more than 50 years, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has supported member countries in establishing and strengthening national forest monitoring systems (NFMS). Despite these efforts to increase data acquisition and transparency, gaps still remain—particularly in developing countries. West Africa, for example, reports only 5 out of 15 countries have information provided by NFMS, such as data on forest volume, biomass and carbon stocks.  

To support West African countries in their commitment to regional forest monitoring, FAO is hosting a series of online capacity-development webinars. This series will target technical staff in West Africa and provide training on remote sensing and geospatial analysis of satellite imagery and data. FAO will introduce its collection of open-source, geospatial tools, OpenForis, including Collect Earth and SPEAL. Participants will have the opportunity to explore the applications of these tools – accessing, analyzing and storing datasets for land monitoring. This series aims to train participants to produce satellite-borne optical and radar imagery mosaics, carry out land cover classifications, perform change detection and stratified area accuracy estimation and use the tools available through OpenForis.  

This training series has been developed under the project, “Global Transformation of Forests for People and Climate: a focus on West Africa,” funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and implemented by FAO and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). All three session are open to anyone interested in learning about the role of geospatial tools in forest monitoring.  

Platform: Zoom Languages: English (See here for the parallel event in French) 

Dates: 25 November – 9 December 2021 

Register Here  

Read about this webinar series in French here

Training Requirements: 

The webinar series is a continuation of the sessions held in 2020. Interested participants who didn’t attend those sessions are required to follow the recordings of sessions 8 and 9, available here:                

https://www.fao.org/redd/news/detail/en/c/1310877/ 

The virtual training workshop will use data and cloud computing systems from a variety of sources (Google Earth Engine, SEPAL). Participants should have a good practical background in GIS and remote sensing and relevant experience in natural resource monitoring.  

Participants are expected to respect the webinar etiquette (mute microphones by default, raise hands to ask to speak, be in a quiet environment), ensure a stable connection to internet and, ahead of the meeting, register on the following platforms to make sure they have access in due time: 

Google Earth Engine     https://signup.earthengine.google.com 

SEPAL                                https://sepal.io 

Collect Earth Online      https://collect.earth 

In addition, in order to download and visualize results, it is necessary to have an FTP manager and a GIS software installed. The following tools will be used by the trainers and participants are encouraged to install these free and open-source tools on their own machines: 

QGIS                                 http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html 

Collect Earth                   https://openforis.org/tools/collect-earth/  

FileZilla                             https://filezilla-project.org/  

Detailed timeline: 

Presenters: 

Adia Bey is a geospatial analyst at FAO with a background in forest and agricultural monitoring. Her current work is focusing on analyzing drivers of deforestation in West Africa and strengthening capacity for land monitoring through remote sensing.  Adia has worked on sustainable land management projects in over 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America with national governments, UN agencies, NGOs, and indigenous communities. She has a degree in Environmental Change and Management from Oxford University. 

Elisée Tchana is a GIS and National Forest Inventory Analyst at FAO. He provides support in National Forest Inventory (NFI) with the development of training material as well as contributing to Open Foris and SEPAL with additional functionality and training material. Elisée is a Forestry Engineer who graduated with a major in Environmental Management of Tropical Forests and Ecosystems from AgroParisTech.  

Pierrick Rambaud is a Developer and a GIS specialist at FAO. He is actively supporting the development of free and open-source solutions for earth observation and monitoring within the OpenForis initiative and the SEPAL platform. It includes modules’ development, technical support for training material and documentation. Pierrick is an engineer with a major in Numerical simulation and holds a PhD in Computer Sciences. 

Rémi d’Annunzio is a FAO Forestry Officer, focusing on Forest monitoring and Climate Change for the Africa region. He provides technical support to FAO capacity development program, to improve forest and land use data analyses and reporting, and to enhance understanding and action needed to address drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. He is actively supporting the development of free and open-source solutions for earth observation and monitoring, contributing to modules within the OpenForis initiative and the SEPAL platform. Remi is a civil engineer with a major in Mathematical Morphology and holds a PhD in Forest Sciences. 

Yelena Finegold is a FAO Forestry Officer, with a focus on capacity development using geospatial tools, forest change monitoring and terrestrial ecosystem restoration. She supports the integration of earth observation data into National Forest Monitoring Systems through capacity development and co-development of free and open source tools in the SEPAL platform. She has a degree in Geography and Economics from Clark University. 

Fatima Mushtaq is a land cover monitoring consultant in Geospatial Unit of Land & Water Division at FAO. She is one of the coordinators of FAO's Land Cover Legend Registry (LCLR) and responsible for preparing land cover legends in support to ISO TC211, FAO hand in hand initiative and SEPAL land cover module. She is actively supporting in organizing training/ workshops on LCLR and other land cover related activities. She is also responsible to provide technical support in punctual requests from various countries for rapid geospatial disaster impact assessment. She has graduation in Space Sciences for Earth Observations and masters in GIS and RS with focus on using machine learning techniques in land cover classification from University of the Punjab, Pakistan.