Aerial view is very useful for monitoring forests, but it cannot provide all the information that good forest management needs. Photo by Gen Takao
Sustainable forest management (SFM) is almost always the product of good planning. And good planning is almost always the product of reliable data, intelligence, and sufficient detail about the current situation.
Remote sensing technology, with its use of satellite imagery and aerial photos to cover wide areas of landscape, is an extremely valuable tool in monitoring forest cover and providing the data.
Despite being a very useful tool in SFM, according to Gen Takao, a CIFOR scientist working in Indonesia, remote sensing cannot fulfill all the monitoring needs demanded by SFM. As the Japanese scientist says, this is because there is more to SFM than meets the eye, or the ‘camera’ for that matter.
“SFM is not only about trees. It’s not only about plants and animals, either, as important as they are. It’s also about people – about people and livelihoods, people and their community and their culture, and so much more,” Takao says.
According to Takao, SFM also includes a range of issues that can never be caught on ‘film’.
“Plants and animals and soil, and people and their activities, all need to be addressed by SFM. But such issues can’t be very well monitored by remote sensing alone,” Takao says, ”Especially at the grass roots level or, to use SFM jargon, at the FMU level, that is, at the scale of the individual forest management unit.”
It is this problem Takao and his Japanese Government funded project is dealing with. Known as “Sustainable Utilization of Diverse Forest Environmental Benefits”, the project is working at providing maps relevant for SFM at the FMU level for researchers and foresters before they actually go into the forest.
An Indonesian colleague on the project, CIFOR’s Hari Priyadi, says providing maps with FMU level detail will be achieved “by distilling the relevant information on forested landscapes from satellite images and other geographic data and combining it with the forest knowledge held by local people and by foresters.”
Ultimately the project hopes to better understand how local and often traditional knowledge and modern technologies such as remote sensing can work together to enhance SFM. The project’s aim is to determine whether:
- Satellite imagery that is interpreted by people familiar with the terrain can provide a useful supplementary reference for better understanding a forest landscape.
- Local knowledge combined with satellite images can help estimate certain values used in various C&I
- Deforestation and forest degradation, and their associated risks, can be better estimated by combining local knowledge with a time series of satellite images.
The project is carried out at multiple sites representing different stages of forest exploitation, with the results to be synthesized to derive common conclusions. These sites include Gunung Halimun and Salak National Park in West Java, Malinau in East Kalimantan, and Muara Bungo in Sumatra. Each of these forests in Indonesia represent one of the following:
- Landscape with a high-population and low-forest-cover
- Landscape with a low-population and high-forest-cover
- Landscape with a medium-population and a quickly developed landscape
Capacity building
The project also has a significant capacity building component. This includes producing a set of guidelines that will assist in satellite imagery becoming a standard tool in SFM and direct activities to enhance the skills of foresters, district officials and local people in making optimal use of geographical information.
Project details:
“Sustainable Utilization of Diverse Forest Environmental Benefits”
Timing: Started in July 2006/ last until June 2009
Donor: Government of Japan
Partners: FFPRI (Japan), Gunung Halimun Salak National Park (under negotiation), ICRAF, JICA National Park Management Project (under negotiation), PT Inhutani II (under negotiation), IPB, district governments and some NGO’s.
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Project assists Asia Forest Parnership
The Japanese project is already proving its worth for a group of key forest stakeholders in Indonesia and the surrounding region through the Asia Forest Partnership.
According to Dr. Takeshi Toma, Head of Partnership Promotion Office - Bureau of International Partnership, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute (FFPRI). "Gen and Hari's work at CIFOR helps provide AFP with a convincing way of recognizing local landscapes. Understandably, when people begin talking about issues like illegal logging, forest fires or land rehabilitation, their tendency is to rely on their own subjective perceptions or maps parachuted in from the remote sensing professionals. This undermines the value of the information in the eyes of the many and varied stakeholders who might be contributing to and assisting the same SFM project. Using maps from the same independent source is an important way of ensuring different stakeholders are undertaking activities from a common reference point and are aiming at the same quantifiable target." |