Regional Initiatives - CARPE
The Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE)
The tropical forests of the Congo Basin represent one of the world’s great remnant blocks of closed canopy habitat. This forest is under increasing pressure from population growth, unsustainable resource use, poor management, and other problems related to poverty and political instability. CARPE is a long-term initiative by USAID to address the issues of deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Congo Basin forest zone, in the middle of the African continent. CARPE’s partners include conservation organizations and appropriate federal agencies. NASA is the CARPE partner responsible for satellite monitoring land-cover and land-use change in the Basin. Landsat and MODIS data are combined to monitor changes in the forest canopy.
One of the least developed regions of the world, the Congo Basin holds massive expanses of closed canopy tropical forest, second only to the Amazon Basin in area. Much of this forest remains relatively intact, yet unsustainable timber exploitation, shifting cultivation, urban expansion, and other human themes are posing increasing threats to this globally-significant tropical forest resource. Loss of forest cover on this scale imposes serious risks of loss of biodiversity, and emission into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide previously locked up in forest biomass.
CARPE’s strategic objective is to reduce the rate of forest degradation and loss of biodiversity through increased local, national, and regional natural resource management capacity. Intermediate Results (IRs) to be achieved in order to reach this objective will involve implementing sustainable forest and biodiversity management practices, strengthening environmental governance, and monitoring forests and other natural resources throughout the region.
CARPE website: http://carpe.umd.edu.
Central Africa Example Project: Forest Biomass and Land-Use Change in Central Africa: Reducing Regional Carbon Cycle Uncertainty
Principal Investigator: Nadine Laporte
Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are working to quantify and map above ground forest biomass over Africa. The research uses state-of-the-art statistical techniques to integrate remotely sensed data, climate and forest inventory measurements. Forest inventory data (dbh(m3/ha) collected from different regions by collaborators are converted into biomass (tons/ha) and used to calibrate an empirical relationship with MODIS 1km spectral reflectance. The derived empirical model will provide the amount of forest biomass at each MODIS pixels, showing the spatial distribution of forest biomass over the entire region.
The detailed spatial estimates of biomass will enable more accurate estimates of carbon flux to be calculated from deforestation, logging, and other human activities. Preliminary results show that remotely sensed data are able to characterize the general spatial distribution of forest biomass over the region. African forest biomass is poorly known relative to biomass in other regions, and this project will provide information integral for a better understanding of the carbon cycle. The methods used in this research are flexible and easily applicable to other tropical regions. The work has also supported, in part, an analysis of carbon emissions from land-use change in all of sub- Saharan Africa. Previous estimates were based on highly aggregated data and ignored important categories of land use. The new analysis reconstructed rates of land-use change and rates of wood harvest from countrylevel statistics and used a bookkeeping model to calculate the annual flux of carbon associated with these changes. Results indicate that changes in land use were responsible for an annual net release of 0.287 PgC/yr during the 1990s. According to the study, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 17% of the global flux of carbon from land-use change.
For more information on this project please contact N. Laporte or R. Houghton or check: http://www.whrc.org/africa and http://www.whrc.org/carbon
