RESTORE+ dedicated session at the IUFRO 125th conference
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RESTORE+ scholars from IIASA, MCC, WRI, INPE, IPEA, WWF, presented the aim of the project and its approach at 125th IUFRO conference in a dedicated session titled: "Integrating grassroots participation, crowd mobilization and big data analysis in forest restoration"
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Pressure for deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics result from a complex interaction of social, biophysical and economic dynamics. Studies and assessments on forest restoration, and sustainable forest management in general, have to consider detailed information that capture social realities, historical biophysical changes, and elements contributing to economic development and future planning of the region. This requires an integrated process that includes detailed data acquisition, stakeholder consultation, modelling and scenario assessment.
Roles of local actors and decision makers are decisive in achieving sustainability of tropical forests. Quite often, social issues among these key stakeholders are either neglected or analyzed separately from economic or other assessments resulting in highly misinformed insights. On the other hand, local actors also have limited accessibility to analytical tools that look into issues that deal directly with their livelihood thus incapable of providing valuable information. This session will showcase experience and future plans of projects that aspire to integrate participatory processes and ground-level data into scientific analytical tools and assessments. Innovative measures such as utilizing citizen-sourced monitoring information and user-friendly land use planning tools are highlighted, as well as scientific assessment done using sophisticated land use models to project various scenarios that will feed into further stakeholder consultation processes in policy formulation. In this session, we will also discuss how crowdsourcing approaches can complement big Earth observation data analytics to provide information about long-term forest transitions. In this type of collaborative work, crowdsourcing is used to validate and select the data samples used for doing data mining in large collections of remote sensing time series.
More to the point, scholars from several partners of Restore+ project (ant other institutions) gave presentations on the following subjects:
Roles of local actors and decision makers are decisive in achieving sustainability of tropical forests. Quite often, social issues among these key stakeholders are either neglected or analyzed separately from economic or other assessments resulting in highly misinformed insights. On the other hand, local actors also have limited accessibility to analytical tools that look into issues that deal directly with their livelihood thus incapable of providing valuable information. This session will showcase experience and future plans of projects that aspire to integrate participatory processes and ground-level data into scientific analytical tools and assessments. Innovative measures such as utilizing citizen-sourced monitoring information and user-friendly land use planning tools are highlighted, as well as scientific assessment done using sophisticated land use models to project various scenarios that will feed into further stakeholder consultation processes in policy formulation. In this session, we will also discuss how crowdsourcing approaches can complement big Earth observation data analytics to provide information about long-term forest transitions. In this type of collaborative work, crowdsourcing is used to validate and select the data samples used for doing data mining in large collections of remote sensing time series.
More to the point, scholars from several partners of Restore+ project (ant other institutions) gave presentations on the following subjects:
- integrated assessment for landscape approach: how to combine remote sensing, crowdsourcing big data and multi-objective modelling
- harnessing the power of volunteers to collect and validate spatial information using Geo-Wiki (mobile crowdsourcing application for citizen science), especially for the validation of data on forestry
- the example of a successful forest and landscape restoration in Sumatra (Indonesia): the application of Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM)
- the effects of Harvesting Practice on Forest Stand Condition, as in the case of Terai Community Forest in Nepal
- exploring different scenarios of forest restoration and evaluating trade-offs associated with the implementation of the new Forest Code in Brazil
