The ReCaREDD project : monitoring forest degradation in East Africa : status and results

A workshop was held at RCMRD, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development, Nairobi 19th -23rd October 2015 under the aegis of the ReCaREDD project, which is funded by DG DEVCO. Both RCMRD and their partner ICPAC have a long standing collaborations with the JRC are the main actors in the East Africa MESA project. The workshop brought together a group of experts from partner countries of the East Africa to take part in a capacity building and information sharing workshop dedicated to reducing barriers for forest degradation monitoring in the tropics. The participants, from 11 countries: Burundi, Djibouti, Eretria, Ethiopia, Kenya (the host country), Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania; held discussions on methods, and reviewed data sources and tools for detecting and quantifying forest degradation using satellite data. The JRC procured high resolution satellite data for test sites in each of the respective partner countries, which were processed and examined using the JRC in-house open source software (IMPACT). During the workshop, partner countries provided information on the spatial localization, driving forces and magnitude of degradation processes in their respective countries. These data were entered into a GIS using the JRC IMPACT tool. Using the JRC methodology the participants validated land cover change maps over the region so as to provide a statistical estimate of landcover change at four epochs - 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2015.