How can forests be conserved using technologies from space?
Environmental activist Leonidas Nzigyemba claims that you cannot organize and govern something that you do not understand.
"We need to use new technology," he continues, "in order to enhance the condition of forests."
Burundi, a small nation in central Africa, has five protected forest areas, and Leonidas Nzigyemba is the chief manager of those regions.
He and his staff have worked with local people to maintain and manage woods for the past 20 years, and Nzijiemba's face lights up when he talks about the fresh aroma and natural beauty of the areas. He describes it as being pure nature.
In his work, Nzjiemba must consider a variety of variables, such as staffing levels and finances, as well as observing the effects of human activity and economies, biodiversity, and climate change.
He is currently utilizing the most recent version of Integrated Management Effectiveness Technology, a free tool, to assist him in tracking and recording all of this.
Through a project called Biopama, the technology was created expressly for such environmental activities (Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management Programme). The African, Caribbean, and Pacific Organization's 79 member states and the European Union both support the program.
According to Nzigyemba, "We utilize this kind of technology to train site managers to use it to use it to collect excellent data, analyze that data, and make appropriate judgments."
The communities and economies most directly impacted by deforestation and forest loss are not the only ones who should care about tracking and safeguarding the world's forests; forests can also assist mitigate the effects of climate change.
The globe loses around 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of its forests each year, according to the United Nations.
The World Wildlife Fund states that this deforestation is to blame for 20% of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions and that "by limiting forest loss, we can reduce carbon emissions and prevent climate change."
The United Nations Decade for Ecosystem Restoration was launched last year in an effort to restore forests and other natural habitats throughout the world. This has caused nations, businesses, and other groups to promise to take action to stop, prevent, and reverse the global ecosystem's destruction.
Yelena Fenigol, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization's Forestry Officer, asserts that simply stating that forests will be restored is insufficient (FAO). "Responsible planning is needed to determine how the ecosystem restoration mechanism will work, then there must be on-the-ground actions that are made possible by investments in ecosystem restoration, as well as monitoring systems in place to monitor their restoration."
New digital technologies to gather, organize, and effectively utilise data are now becoming more prevalent as a result of the growing focus on forests.
The FAO Ferm Ecosystem Monitoring Framework is one such website. The website, which was introduced last year, highlights changes in forests all across the world using satellite photography. Anyone with access to the Internet can view the maps and data, including scientists, government employees, businesspeople, and regular citizens.
NASA is the system used by Ferm as its main data source for studying the dynamics of the world's ecosystems. This acronym, referred to simply as Gedi, is pronounced similarly to the term Jedi, which refers to a Star Wars figure. The company's motto, "May the forest be with you," is a play on the famous phrase that appears in every scene in this film series: "May the ability be with you."
Actually, the technology itself seems like science fiction brought to life. According to Laura Duncanson, a member of the Jaday project's leadership team from the University of Maryland's Department of Geographical Sciences, "we shoot lasers at trees from the International Space Station."
Expert in remote sensing Dr. Duncanson continues, "We use reflected energy to 3D map forests, including their height, canopy density, and carbon content... This is an intriguing new tool because it allows us to more precisely calculate the carbon emissions linked to forest loss. For decades, we have been able to monitor forest degradation from space.
Norway's Business Planet Labs, which manages more than 200 camera satellites, also provides maps and data to Ferm. Every day, these satellites capture around 350 million photos of the Earth's surface, each one square kilometer in size.
Governments and businesses all throughout the world can also directly use Planet Labs. Its cameras can be used to monitor important infrastructure, such as ports, in addition to forests. They can also be used to monitor drought, agriculture, energy, and infrastructure projects.
According to Remi D'Annunzio, a forestry expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization, all of the available photographs from space have "dramatically transformed the way we monitor forests, because they have provided us with extremely repeatable views of areas" (FAO).
In fact, we can take a complete picture of the Earth every four to five days using all of these openly accessible satellites.
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