Education & Capacity Building
Workshop on New Approaches for Measuring and Monitoring Carbon Stock and Forest Cover in the Tropics
Cattien National Park, Vietnam – November 9-12, 2009
The workshop on New Approaches for Measuring and Monitoring Carbon Stock and Forest Cover in the Tropics brought together 33 government and NGO technical officers from seven Southeast Asian countries for four days of training, discussion and collaboration on forest cover mapping and carbon density mapping. Held at Cattien National Park outside of Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam, the workshop incorporated theoretical presentations on regional, national and pan-tropical approaches to forest-cover and carbon measuring and monitoring, practical field training, as well as policy applications of methods for the emerging Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Participants included representatives from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Lao PDR. Following the workshop a sub-set or participants participated in an intensified field training to further learn methods being used by the Woods Hole Research Center for calibrating remotely sensed data with field measurements in the creation of a pan-tropical biomass map. Collaboration with in-country participants for the development of national and pan-tropical maps is an integral part of the project with the aim of making available these data sets to forestry administrations, NGOs and other organizations for use in conservation or compensated reduction programs.
The Woods Hole Research Center would like to thank the following institutions for their assistance: Cattien National Park, Vietnam; Cambodia Forestry Administration; Department of Forestry Lao PDR; Forest Research Institute of Malaysia; WWF Papua New Guinea; Royal Forestry Department, Thailand; Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV), FAO Vietnam, Forest Inventory and Planning Institute, Vietnam Forestry Administration and Pan-Tropical scholar Nguyen Hanh Quyen from the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) and Ned Horning of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for helping to organize and plan the workshop.
Funding and support:
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Google.org, and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation.
