Sustainable forest management ongoing cyclical process of planning, action, and monitoring. If we study that description word-for-word, it clearly suggests that monitoring comes last in the cycle. But according to CIFOR’s Gen Takao, monitoring should come first.

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 external data.

But remote sensing has its limits, according to Takao, and cannot satisfy all SFM monitoring needs. As the Japanese scientist says, there is more to SFM than meets the eye. Or the camera.

“SFM is not only about trees. Nor is it only about plants and animals, as important as they are. SFM is also 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 that Takao and his Japanese Government funded project are dealing with. Known as “Sustainable Utilization of Diverse Forest Environmental Benefits”, the project is working towards 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 interpreted by people familiar with the terrain can enhance our understanding of the forest landscape.
• Local knowledge combined with satellite images can help estimate certain values used in assessing SFM.
• Deforestation and degradation can be better quantified using local knowledge with satellite images.

The project is carried out at multiple sites representing different stages of forest exploitation, with the results 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 descriptions:

• High population/low forest cover
• Low population/high forest cover
• Medium-population/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:

Project name: Sustainable Utilization of Diverse Forest Environmental Benefits.

Timing: Started in July 2006- last until June 2009

Donor: Government of Japan

Partners: Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute (FFPRI, Japan), Gunung Halimun Salak National Park (tbc), ICRAF, JICA National Park Management Project, PT Inhutani II (tbc), IPB, district governments and NGO’s.