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A web-based service to monitor deforestation and forest degradation in Africa
REACTIFI will develop a forest inventory (FI) service tailored to REDD+ Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) in Central and East Africa.
Developing a tool that helps saving forests
REDD+ is an undertaking by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that offers developing countries, particularly in Africa, financial incentives to avoid deforestation and forest degradation and thus reduce climate-damaging CO2 emissions. REACTIFI also works towards this goal.
We lead the consortium of the REACTIFI project, working alongside our partners on its development and implementation.
The year by which Uganda would lose its natural forest cover if the current deforestation rate of 1.5% continues
hectares of Uganda’s forests have been lost only between 2000 and 2015.
hectares of Ugandan forests are expected to be restored by 2030 with the help of agroforestry systems like REACTIFI.
The challenge
An existential threat in the making
Deforestation is much more than an abstract concept climate activists throw around in blog posts, and it is much more than an alarming buzzword scientists bring up in papers and speeches. Deforestation is a reality.
In Central and Eastern Africa, it is the result of illegal logging, over-harvesting, or clearing for agricultural purpose. According to estimates, loss of forests corresponds to around 170,000 football fields per year – a rate at which several African countries would completely lose their natural forest area by 2060.
The challenge is thus much more than your standard business hurdle: it is a potential threat to several communities and, ultimately, to the whole planet. Monitoring deforestation is an essential factor in keeping it under control, but there are criticalities: the areas to check are vast, and monitoring is often carried out manually.
How can we fight deforestation by using the latest technical resources?
REACTIFI will develop a web-based forest inventory (FI) service tailored to REDD+ Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) in Central and East Africa. It will provide information about forest status, deforestation and degradation, at a TIER L2-3 using innovative methods on Copernicus Sentinel-1 & -2, airborne and terrestrial data. It will provide forest managers, administration, and practitioners of national forest monitoring systems with a set of tools that gives them access to beyond-state-of-the-art methodology and technology to support their regional and national MRV processes.
The REACTIFI processing engine will take advantage of novel methods for automated analysis of data and extraction of information from satellite, airborne and terrestrial datasets relevant to MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, Verification) reporting such as biomass and carbon stock estimates.
REACTIFI will allow forest managers, administration, and all people involved in relevant processes to explore remote sensing data and derived products for their areas of interest. This enables users to act more quickly and accurately than they can with their current systems.
To know more details about this project, reach out now to one of our experts! Whether you work in forest administration, conservation, or landscape ecology, or are interested in optimizing existing processing involving large amounts of data, we are looking forward to hearing from you.
Our project partners
Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG
This project is partly funded by the Austrian Research Promotion agency under the project number 878888. Thank you for supporting our cause!
Joanneum Research
Joanneum Research analyzes remote sensing data in order to monitor the environment, develop algorithms for image analysis, process chains for data pre-processing, and generate 3D information from stereo image data.
