In April 2022, representatives from Guatemala participated in a technical workshop on Methods and Tools for Forest Carbon Accounting and Monitoring, convened by SilvaCarbon in the state of Oregon. To follow up on several areas of work identified by Guatemala in this workshop, SilvaCarbon in collaboration with the NASA-USAID program, SERVIR, provided training on three tools designed to distinguish disturbances and changes in forest areas: LandTrendr and CCDC-SMA, and BULC-D. The workshop covered the fundamental concepts of each of the algorithms and an interactive part to run each of the methods and obtain maps of forest cover change. The general objective is that the participants became familiar with new remote sensing methods to identify changes in long satellite time series and apply this knowledge according to their work and needs.

Under the banner of its CEOS Chair year in 2023, GISTDA will hold a workshop in collaboration with SilvaCarbon on incorporating global AFOLU datasets into national inventory and reporting processes. The SilvaCarbon program goal is to increase capacity to monitor changes in critical ecosystems, leading to better management and protection of forests. The workshop had the broad objective of better connecting Southeast Asian national forest inventory agencies with CEOS space agencies to improve the uptake of EO datasets. Country-level calibration, validation, and assessment of global products are critical steps on the pathway to uptake of global EO datasets. This workshop used two forest sites, a montane rain forest and a mangrove forest, as a means of exploring the relationships and synergies between ground-based and spaceborne datasets. Additional goals of the workshop include capacity building for conducting mangrove forest inventories and exploring opportunities to improve emission factors using space-based LiDAR data.

Led by the US SilvaCarbon Program, the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) convenes a Capacity Building Summit every few years to bring together countries and development partners to discuss, plan, and refine international collaboration on capacity-building support to countries on forest monitoring and MRV issues. The last Summit was convened at The University of Maryland, College Park, during this week and provided an opportunity to refresh these principles and the broader collaborative approach to capacity building under GFOI. To learn more about this past Capacity Building Summit, please click on the link below.