Visitors from Africa

at the Research Center

	Mr. Josef Ipalaka

Fall of 2007

Several developed countries are considering ways to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), provided adequate funding mechanisms are available to help implement forest policies and monitoring.

In the framework of the preparations for the REDD discussion at the Bali COP13 Conference, the WHRC hosted a visitor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr. Josef Ipalaka. Josef is a member of DRC's congress as well as a forest policy expert. He also works for the Ministry of the Environment, and has been collaborating with Dr. Nadine Laporte on forest mapping and monitoring in the DRC since the early 1990's. As part of this work, the WHRC team is assisting the Ministry of the Environment with the development of REDD policies, starting with a report released in Bali. The report shows, for the first time, the distribution of the above-ground carbon and emissions from deforestation between 1990-2000. It also provides an initial estimate of the cost to reduce deforestation by 50%. We are now planning to improve our estimates of potential short and long term costs of REDD, the distribution of benefits to forest peoples, and the technological capacity for ensuring accurate monitoring of DRC's forests.

Fall of 2006 - Visiting Scholars from Italy and Africa

Valerio Avitabile is a forest ecologist, and was awarded a 4-month Research fellowship to work at Woods Hole Research Center to develop new methods to map biomass in Africa using satellite imagery. Valerio is currently working at the Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) in the land cover mapping Unit, and is currently involved in the CARBO-AFRICA project, funded by the European Commission. The goal of the project is to set up a monitoring network for greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in Africa, in order to quantify, understand and predict, through a multi-disciplinary integrated approach, GHG emissions in Sub-Saharan Africa. We hope it will be the starting point for a longer collaboration on biomass and carbon studies in tropical Africa.

	Valerio Avitabile		Dr. Grace Nangendo

Dr. Grace Nangendo, currently employed by Wildlife Conservation Society Uganda, is a forest ecologist. She has training in natural resource management, GIS and remote sensing, with interests in the dynamics of forest-woodland mosaics. She will be working at WHRC for six weeks during Fall 2006. Grace is the main point of contact in Uganda for remote sensing applications. She is working with the WHRC on conservation issues in the Albertine rift region, located in Uganda, eastern Africa. During her stay in the U.S. she worked on developing new methods to map vegetation cover change for the northern part of the Albertine rift valley.

Three collaborators from Africa visited the WHRC in 2004.

In February, Olivier Desmet left the Republic of Congo for a 2-week stay at the Center to learn more about the use of remote sensing for improving forest management. Olivier has been working at the CIB logging company in the Republic of Congo since 2001, participating in the development of management plans for over 1.3 million hectares of tropical rain forest and assuming the management of their Reduced Impact Logging Program. The Research Center's Africa Program has been working with Olivier and the CIB Forest Management Unit since 2003, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Congolese Ministry of Environment and Forest Economy (MEFE).

Olivier Desmet		Dr. Vincent Paul Onana		Paola Mekui

In July, Dr. Vincent Paul Onana visited the Research Center to discuss collaboration on the monitoring of coastal forests of Cameroon using radar imagery. Dr. Onana is a radar remote sensing expert and an Associate Professor at the University of Douala, Cameroon. A proposal to support this work is planned.

In August, Paola Mekui of the World Wildlife Fund visited the Research Center for 3 weeks to advance the development of a monitoring system for the Minkebé National Park in Gabon. As the GIS Manager of the park, Paola used her time at the Center to learn about the applications of remote sensing to forest conservation and park management. Her trip was sponsored by the USAID's Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE).

©Woods Hole Research Center, 2008