Towards operational forestry tools for Kyoto Protocol reporting

The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) creates a need for tools for monitoring and mapping areas subject to afforestation, reforestation and deforestation (ARD) activities and estimating the resulting changes in the carbon stock. To answer this need the European Space Agency (ESA) has initiated several activities in order to define, implement and demonstrate products and services, based on Earth Observation (both optical and radar satellite images) providing for the baseline year (1990) and then for each n years forest inventory maps (forest/non-forest, forest biomes, typologies or species) and forest change maps (ARD) with estimates of affected area and related change in carbon mass and associated confidence information. The minimum area of change to be detected will be 1 ha or less. The potential users of such services have been identified and collaboration has been established with key players involved in the national reporting to the UNFCCC of several European countries and within the European Commission. ESA has also established collaboration with the UNFCCC, who has requested ESA to support the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) in establishing guidelines for the reporting. Several of the users have now committed themselves to participate actively in projects managed by ESA where the work is performed by European industry and research institutes. The projects aim to develop prototypes in a first phase and to implement and demonstrate an operational service in the second phase. The focus is on answering the practical needs of the users, and an important aspect is to integrate the products into the user's current systems and procedures. In addition to expressing his needs and requirements the user will provide access to data, review product specifications and the service definition and participate in the demonstration, validation and assessment of the products and service.