The GsAL is traveling back to Bangkok, Thailand to help the SERVIR-Mekong team, in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service-Remote Sensing Applications Center (USFS-RSAC), SilvaCarbon, and the Asian Development Bank GMS Core Environment Program (ADB-CEP), organize a workshop entitled Typology for a Regional Land Cover Monitoring System, in Bangkok, Thailand.
The main objectives of the workshop are to maximize consensus for a consistent regional land cover typology and establish working groups for developing a system to produce periodic regional land cover products.
Participants will be asked to review a technical document and prepare a brief presentation outlining their institution’s land cover monitoring-related work.
Background
In 2015, SERVIR-Mekong conducted a geospatial needs assessment for the Lower Mekong countries which included individual country consultations. The team found that many countries were dependent on land cover and land use maps for land resource planning, quantifying ecosystem services including resilience to climate change, biodiversity conservation, and other critical social issues. Many of the Lower Mekong countries have developed national scale land cover maps derived in part from remote sensing products and geospatial technologies. However, updates are infrequent and classification systems do not always meet the needs of key user groups. In addition, data products stop at political boundaries and are often not accessible. Many of the Lower Mekong countries rely on global land cover products to fill the gaps of their national efforts, compromising consistency between data and policies. These gaps in national efforts can be filled by a flexible regional land cover monitoring system that is co-developed by regional partners with the specific intention of meeting national transboundary needs, for example including consistent forest definitions in transboundary watersheds. During this assessment, regional stakeholders identified a need for a land cover monitoring system that will produce frequent, high quality land cover maps using a consistent regional classification scheme that is compatible with national country needs.
Based on this need and demand, SERVIR-Mekong is leveraging the recent development of remote sensing science and technology, such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), and working together with production partners to develop a system that will use a common set of input data sources to generate high-quality regional land cover maps on a regular basis (i.e. annual or every two years). The system is being designed to facilitate improved policy, planning, and decision making by a wide range of users (such as government agencies, local community groups, non-profit organizations, and the private sector). An important component of this system’s design is the ability to leverage the recent developments in remote sensing science and technology that can contribute significantly to more timely land cover inventories. The system’s design will also enable more effective and efficient mapping efforts. For example, GEE allows cloud-based storage and computation of large quantities of remotely sensed data that can be organized in many ways to meet specific needs.
The development of a consistent regional land cover typology for categorizing land cover data using regional [i.e., regionally agreed] definitions that is reasonably compatible with existing national classification systems, is the first step needed for such a Mekong specific monitoring system. In this context, a 3- day exchange will be organized to train, discuss, consult and agree on a consistent typology/classification system that will be used for the regional land cover monitoring system for Lower Mekong countries.
