When talking about deforestation in Brazil we often focus on the Amazon. But not everyone knows that just on the Amazonian border lies its often forgotten neighbour — the second largest biome in South America — the Cerrado. This overlooked giant represents more than 20% of Brazil's land area, more than 2 million square kilometers in total. Can't quite grasp its size yet? It is the size of Greenland. From the point of view of biological diversity, the Brazilian Cerrado is recognized as the richest savannah in the world, sheltering more than 11 000 catalogued species of native plants (of which...

How can a country tackle assessing forest degradation if it doesn’t have historical field data? Enter SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring), a powerful, user-friendly, cloud-based computing platform for big data processing. SEPAL, an FAO and Norway collaboration, provides free access to Earth observation data and allows countries to overcome processing issues related to poor Internet connections or low computing power. One of the modules in SEPAL is Break detection For Additive Seasonal Trends (BFAST), an algorithm that identifies the date and location of change using a time series of historical satellite imagery. Using...

Drawing on successful pilot REDD+ initiatives supported by the UN-REDD Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Nepal and Viet Nam, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) have released a manual for facilitators to guide planners and stakeholders in the development of subnational plans for REDD+ action. In countries with a wide range of forest ecosystems such as Nepal, subnational REDD+ planning is essential for operationalizing a REDD+ National Strategy. Based on participatory planning methodologies, local REDD+ action plans in Nepal are being developed following consultation to identify key challenges and solutions as...

A new research paper in the Global Change Biology journal has been published on forest biomass, productivity and carbon cycling along a rainfall gradient in West Africa, providing the first comprehensive analysis of Net Primary Productivity (NPP) and its carbon allocation to woody, canopy and root growth components at contrasting lowland West African forests spanning a rainfall gradient. For information/access to full paper, please contact María del Carmen Ruiz-Jaén, Technical Advisor - Forest Monitoring and Community Forestry, FAO, email: [email protected]. Citation: Moore S, Adu-Bredu S, Duah-Gyamfi A, et al. Forest biomass, productivity and carbon cycling along a rainfall gradient in West...

A new paper has been published in Springer Nature’s Environmental and Ecological Statistics journal on emission factor estimators used for large-area forest inventories. Written by Luca Birigazzi, Javier G. P. Gamarra and Timothy G. Gregoire, this study aims to help in the choice of estimator to be used in forest surveys. It also provides a method to obtain unbiased emission factors for activity data estimated through visual  interpretation of a sample of remote imagery (such as in Collect Earth). For further information, please contact Luca Birigazzi, National Forest Inventory and Greenhouse Gas Inventory Expert ([email protected]) or Javier G. P. Gamarra, National Forest...