Where We Work
Center researchers have field sites around the globe, including in the Amazon and cerrado of South America, the Congo Basin and East Africa, the high latitudes of North America and Eurasia, and across the United States. In addition, our scientists integrate satellite and remote sensing technologies to map and monitor forests, biomass, habitats, environmental change, and other ecosystems and services throughout the globe.
This interactive map highlights examples of ongoing research initiatives. A blue highlighted area that appears after selecting a dot denotes a remote sensing-based project that focuses on a broad region.
Please check this page often as we will feature new projects and locations regularly.
Pantropical Capacity Building
An integral part of the Woods Hole Research Center’s Pan-tropical Mapping Initiative is the transfer of knowledge and skills about forest and carbon mapping to those countries that are increasingly engaged in international efforts to slow deforestation. Through on-the-ground field work and collaborations, these countries are able to better evaluate alternative options for management of their forest resources. Through workshops, a visiting scholars program, and other related activities, new maps are being produced, assessed, disseminated and discussed with various stakeholders within countries - including representatives from government, civil society, indigenous and traditional forest communities, and the private sector.
Sustainable Communities, Tapajos River, Brazil
Community forestry is widely regarded as a promising strategy through which smallholders can increase income and improve quality of life, while conserving local forest resources. One such initiative is the Caboclo Workshops of the Tapajós. This approach combines small-scale, technologically and organizationally simple production of high quality finished products for green consumer markets. Since the early 2000s, the Woods Hole Research Center and the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) have worked with traditional communities on the shores of the Tapajós River to develop forest management systems supplying local furniture workshops.
INFORMS Project, Central Africa
One of the key projects for the Woods Hole Research Center’s work in Africa is the collaboration with the INtegrated FORest Monitoring System for Central Africa Project (INFORMS). INFORMS was designed to monitor land-cover and land-use changes in the tropical rain forests of Central Africa through mapping of forest types, extent, spatial distribution, and biomass using an integrated approach of remote sensing and field observations. The goal is to integrate data acquired from satellites with field observations from forest inventories, wildlife surveys, and socioeconomic studies to map and monitor forest resources. Because cooperation among all stakeholders is necessary for a long-term and sustainable system of forest conservation and management, the project emphasizes partnership and coordination with international, regional, national, and local partners from the non-profit, governmental, and commercial sectors.
Arctic Ecosystems
The Arctic is at the epicenter of climate change: warming is greatest in the Arctic, arctic ecosystems are particularly sensitive to warming, and changes in the Arctic can strongly impact the global climate system. Perhaps more than any other large region on Earth, the Arctic functions as a “system” with land, ocean, and atmospheric components of the system tightly coupled. Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are leading several international efforts to understand both the impacts of climate change on the Arctic as well as the feedbacks from the Arctic to the global climate system.
Land Use Change in Southern Maine
Maine is at a developmental crossroads. Population growth in southern Maine (largely York and Cumberland Counties) has been at a record pace, with increases in these two counties alone making up half the population growth of the State since 1950. With population growth comes development and sprawl, usually at rate much higher than the population increase. From 1986 to 1993, some 30,000 acres of forestlands in Southern Maine were developed. Also, it is projected that Cumberland and York Counties will lose another 195,000 acres of private timberlands and 46,000 acres of agricultural land by the year 2050. These lands will go into an estimated 208,000 acres of new and suburb and urban lands, an increase of 56 percent. And of those who move to Southern Maine, it is estimated that 75 percent go to rural areas rather than to urban areas. The challenge is to slow these trends by increasing local awareness. This project offers land cover change maps of the area, offering insight into challenges, choices, and possible solutions.
NBCD - National Biomass and Carbon Dataset
Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are producing a high-resolution “National Biomass and Carbon Dataset for the year 2000” (NBCD2000), the first ever spatially explicit inventory of its kind. The dataset is being produced as part of a project funded under NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program with additional support from the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Project (LANDFIRE). The primary objective of the project is to generate a high-resolution (30 m), year-2000 baseline estimate of basal area-weighted canopy height, aboveground live dry biomass, and standing carbon stock for the conterminous United States.
