SarVision at climate conference in Copenhagen
The US, Australia, France, Japan, Norway and Britain agreed to make 3.5 billion US dollars available for developing countries that produce ambitious plans to slow and eventually reverse deforestation. More forest news from the conference here.
Funding will however only be granted if countries allow for full transparency of their emissions. Having scientifically sound forest monitoring systems in place is therefore a key requirement. SarVision, Wageningen University, the GEO Forest Carbon Tracking task members, Google and others successfully presented the state of the art in forest monitoring at the climate conference.
A Netherlands Space Office (NSO) press release (in Dutch) on the new radar forest monitoring methodology developed by the Wageningen team for cloudy tropical regions, was very well covered in newspapers and other media in the Netherlands.
Listen to a brief interview with Niels Wielaard (SarVision) on the national news radio station here (in Dutch).
Monitoring systems
Regional scale tropical forest monitoring (details of 50-1000m).
High resolution tropical forest monitoring (details of 20-30m).
Local surveillance with TerraSAR-X radar or low-cost aircraft systems (details up to 1 m).
Application fields
- Biodiversity conservation (e.g. mapping and monitoring wildlife habitat)
- Legal and Sustainable Forest/Plantation Monitoring (e.g. pulp and paper, palm oil) production monitoring