Forest for people
What do woods, gender, satellite maps and nuts have in common with forests? The answer might be simple. A common agenda to keep the world’s forests forever. However, the big question is how we can attain sustainable forest governance?
nternational Forests Day – 2013 Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP6) Team, Colombia
March 21 is celebrated as the International Forests Day. The International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and partners – the Bioversity International and CIPAV – decided to share rich and diverse knowledge through a 90 minutes seminar.
The theme of this scientific seminar was apt: Forests for People. The ‘lightning talk’ mode of the seminar touched upon wide range of topics with the forests and people as the key focus.
Introduction: Carolina Navarrete, Coordinator of the Decision and Policy Analysis (DAPA), introduced the seminar highlighting the significance of collaborative work on forest that cross-cut with agriculture, climate, food security, gender, mapping, non-timber forest products, and biodiversity. She encouraged further strengthening of the existing cross-cutting collaborations among different stakeholders and partners working on forest governance.
Sustainable Forest Governance: Keynote speech (via skype) by Prof. Han van Dijk, forest engineer and anthropologist with 25 years of experience in Africa – fragile and conflict states and natural resource management, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. “I think the five key future challenges for the Sustainable Forest governance (SFM) are mitigation of climate change through forests and trees; knowledge base; reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) and forest tenure reform; gender equity; and multiple uses of forests” said van Dijk.
Five Key Challenges for Sustainable Forest Governance
CGIAR Research Program (CRP 6) on Forests, Trees, and Agroforestry: Livelihoods and Governance: Glenn Hyman, GIS expert and the CRP 6 focal contact at CIAT provided an outline on forest related research under the CRP 6 program. Hyman stressed on the on-going activities related to livelihood themes, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and trade theme, the sentinel landscapes and mainstreaming gender in forests.
CIAT participation in CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry
Silvopastoral systems for forest protection: Julián Chará, Coordinator of Center for Research on Sustainable Systems of Agriculture Production (CIPAV) presented the urgency to promote silvopastoral systems in Latin America, in particular in Colombia. “CIPAV advocates the Intensive Silvopastoral Systems (ISS) because it increases efficiency of biological processes by combining fodder shrubs, pastures and timber trees” said Chará.
Silvopastoral systems to promote forest protection in Colombia
“Mapforgen is an atlas for the conservation of forest genetic resources” explains Evert Thomas, Associate Expert at the Bioversity International, Colombia. Thomas highlighted Mapforgen as a platform where knowledge is exchanged with and between local communities and partners. He encouraged everyone to become member of knowledge sharing platform on genetic diversity – Mapforgen.
Forests for People: through Gender Lens. Purabi Bose, Social Scientist and the CRP 6 Gender expert at CIAT explains that “gender equity and gender mainstreaming are critical for sustainable forest management. ‘Gender equity’ is also about who represents and how”. “We need policy that promotes equitable forest land tenure rights, access to forest resources, and empowerment for both marginalized men and women to participate in the decision-making process of sustainable forest governance” mentions Bose.
Gender and Forests: Policy Implications
Amazonian Brazil nut and Climate variability: Julian Moll-Rock is an ecologist and Harvard fellow affiliated with the DAPA presented his collaborative work with the Bioversity International and CIAT. “Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) is an edible seed of a large tree found exclusively in the Amazonian forests of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador and is vulnerable to climate variability” explains Julian.
Read more: http://prezi.com/yv0qzt1lepjv/tree-day/?kw=view-yv0qzt1lepjv&rc=ref-14547841
Terra-i: Alejandro Coca-Costa, Louis Reymondin and team from the DAPA presented the Terra-i, an open source and free-of-charge satellite based monitoring system for deforestation in Latin America. They envisage making the Terra-i technique useful to other parts of the world. For more details on this interesting initiative kindly also check webpage: www.terra-i.org
2013 3 terrai_ifd_ciat_slideshare from Terra-i
Originally post in DAPA blog: http://dapa.ciat.cgiar.org/forests-for-people/
The Terra-i team together with CRS El Salvador under the Raices project carried out a virtual workshop through the teams platform to technicians from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, CARITAS, Universidad El Salvador, CENTA, about the Mapping of land cover using remote sensors and open source tools such as GEE, SEPAL and QGIS- Plugin Semi Automatic Classification.
Near real-time vegetation loss detection in Southwestern Ethiopia: calibration, validation, and implementation of the Terra-i system
The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (the Alliance) conducted a training for local stakeholders on the use of Terra-i as part of the collaboration with the Netherlands Development Organisation – SNV in the Coffee Agroforestry and Forest Enhancement for REDD+ (CAFÉ-REDD) Project.
From May 8-12, 2017, the Terra-i team, together with staff from the DGOTA of Peru's Ministry of Environment, carried out the first field validation of vegetative land cover changes detected during Terra-i monitoring for 2016 and 2017, using the technology UAV. This work was carried out under the framework of the project “Sustainable Amazonian Landscapes”. The team carried out over-flights with a Phantom 3 advanced rotor drone and a fixed-wing Ebee drone in seven townships of Yurimaguas. The objective of this work was to recognize the dynamics of land cover and land use changes in the region while at the same time to validate the accuracy of the detections of forest loss being monitored by Terra-i in Yurimaguas.
The Terra-i team has worked hard on renovating Terra-i’s website since early this year. A set of new features on the website provides interactive contents and facilitates adaptation to the mobile devices of our users. The fresh website was developed using the latest update of an open-source, Java-based web system, Magnolia CMS 5.4.4. This update was customized to add different categories of interaction such as news, vegetation cover changes, and information, among others.
Globally more than 1 billion people depend on forests for their livelihoods. Forests play a crucial role in climate regulation, ecosystem services provision and regulation, water supply, carbon storage and many other functions that support biodiversity. Currently the global rate of deforestation is substantial, and there is a growing need for timely, spatially explicit data that flag natural vegetation changes due to human activities.
The latest update of Terra-i has been used with the Co$ting Nature ecosystem services assessment tool to understand the impacts of recent forest loss in Colombia on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
During the 1st and 12th of June 2015, the Terra-i team, together with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP) and the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina (VLIR-UNALM), conducted the second field validation of the data produced by the Terra-I system. This time, the study area was the Yurimaguas district, Alto Amazonas province, Loreto region (Peru). We used information on populated places, main roads, rivers and information on land cover changes detected for 2013, 2014 and 2015 to define the 65 sampling points (or Terra-I pixels) for the validation process (Figure 1).