I once heard, ‘In order to have a healthy planet, we need to have healthy forests’. Deforestation has been a global issue for decades. In the 1800’s and 1900’s Europe, Russia, North Africa, and the Middle East had a vast amount of deforestation, but within the past decade theses regions have stabilized and re-growth is now beginning to occur. Today the majority of deforestation has and continues to occur in the taiga and tropical regions where the vast amount of our world’s forest lives. To raise awareness on sustainable management, development, and conservation of all types of forests, the United Nations declared 2011 the International Year of the Forests.

So what needs to be done to help assess and manage our global forests and what tools do we need to get started?

Firstly, we need to have accurate, up-to-date maps of our forests. Forested areas cover roughly 30% of the world’s surface, that’s about 40 million km². The forested areas are not spread evenly throughout the world, nor is it located within the same climatic regions. With a high percentage begin spread among taiga regions (North America and Russia) and tropical regions (South America and Southeast Asia) that have a large difference in climate and environment. Mapping these regions can be extremely difficult due to rugged terrain, extreme climate and weather conditions, consistent cloud cover, and triple canopy forest. As we all know, Fugro’s GeoSAR (Dual Band IFSAR mapping system) is known for resolving these mapping challenges as well as being best suited for large are mapping.

GeoSAR’s unique technology supports the collection, analysis, assessment, and management of forests and carbon estimation on a country-wide basis. With it’s foliage penetrating technology (P-band), GeoSAR is unique in it’s ability to derive detailed accurate terrain data in the thickest forests and densest jungles. The difference between the X-band and P-band data provides important information that is used to develop value-added data sets such as land use/land cover and biomass estimates. Combined with ground truth data and satellite monitoring, this information is found to be extremely valuable for the assessment and management of our global forest.

GeoSAR not only provides the technology necessary for accurately mapping these difficult environments but also can provide value- added products found necessary for forest assessment and management when combined with satellite imagery that provide essential monitoring capabilities. Below you will find an example of biomass estimation collected over a tropical region generated from GeoSAR data. Do your part in spreading the awareness for the International Year of the Forests, and please remember ‘In order to have a healthy plant, we need to have healthy forest’. Please feel free to leave a comment or request further information!