An international meeting on Twenty-five years of community forestry: Mapping tree dynamics in the Middle Hills of Nepal.

Kathmandu, Nepal
Meeting Date: 
11/29/2018 to 11/30/2018
Meeting Report: 
PDF icon Nepal Meeting report.pdf

Meeting Focus: 

Since the 1980s, Nepal has gained worldwide recognition for path breaking achievements in community forest management. Forests account for upwards of 45% of Nepal’s national land area (nearly 6.5 million ha) and are one of the country’s major productive resources, contributing about 10% to the gross domestic product. In 1988, Nepal’s Department of Forests (DoF) identified 61% of the nation’s total forest area (3.5 million ha) as forest that could be transferred legally to local communities and managed for their benefit. Today, community forests occupy nearly 23% of Nepal’s total forest area (1.8 million ha), the management of which involves over 22,000 community forest user groups comprising 1.8 million households and nearly 40% of Nepal’s population. The spatially-explicit impacts of this transition in forest management have not been documented in part due to the difficulty of mapping tree cover in mountainous environments where remote sensing imagery analysis is hindered by topographic effects, e.g., shading, the presence of clouds, snow, and ice, and the inaccessibility of areas of rugged terrain for ground truth data collection. Indeed, only a few national scale forest surveys have been conducted. Mapping Nepal’s forest transition and developing a comprehensive understanding of factors underlying observed changes in tree cover are critical if Nepal is to improve upon its already successful resource initiative. We distinguish between tree cover and forests because in the Middle Hills a number of unirrigated agricultural lands have been abandoned and replaced with tree cover. Our remote sensing work does not distinguish between closed canopy forests and tree canopy so where possible we prefer to use the term ‘tree cover’.
 
This meeting seeks to quantify the rate, extent, and socioeconomic importance of Nepal’s tree transition based on three decades of Landsat satellite data and spatial modeling. The meeting has four overarching themes: 
  1. Describing project methodologies (satellite image processing, census and interview data analysis, and spatial modeling)
  2. Documenting annual tree cover change since 1990 at 30m spatial resolution 
  3. Identifying physiographic and socioeconomic variables associated with tree cover change and quantify their respective influences, and 
  4. Assessing how foreign labor migration and remittances correlate to tree cover and the future of community forestry in Nepal 

Meeting Venue: 
Hotel Himalaya
Kupondole Height, Lalitpur, Kahtmandu, Nepal 1-866-599-6674
https://hotelhimalaya.com.np/

Meeting Registration:
TBA

Main Scientific Organizers:
        1. Dr. Ram Chhetri, Resources Himalaya. Kathmandu, Nepal
        2. Dr. Naya Sharma Paudel, ForestAction, Kathmandu, Nepal
        3. Dr. Jefferson Fox, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

Agenda: Scientific presentations
        1. Background/overview from ICIMOD? (1990 and 2010 forest cover products)
        2. Terrain correction and image compositing
        3. Tree cover change and geographic analysis
        4. Socioeconomic change
        5. Spatial modeling
        6. Integration of tree cover change

Hands-on training session with tree cover products in Google Earth Engine – December 3rd - 4th,  2018

Training Objectives:
We will introduce the cloud-based Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for Big Data remote sensing analysis, and provide hands-on training with a range of processing techniques and open-access datasets available through GEE. With an understanding of GEE in place, we will discuss in detail the new 25-year Nepal tree cover/change dataset including its methodology, accuracy, and derived products. For comparison, we will also discuss access and use of the Hansen et al. global forest cover dataset. 

Schedule:
December 3 – GEE fundamentals
09:00-10:30am :  Introduction to Google Earth Engine; Javascript API tour; GEE data concepts (e.g. collections); code sharing and saving
10:30-10:45am : Break
10:45-12:00pm : Exploring and visualizing available GEE raster datasets – focus on Landsat 8, MODIS, and Sentinel-2
12:00-01:00pm : Lunch
01:00-03:00pm : Filtering imageCollections and featureCollections; applying functions and algorithms to the collections (e.g. map, reducers)
03:00-03:15pm : Break
03:15-05:00pm : Band correlation/covariance, image enhancements, and band combinations

December 4 – Project specific components
09:00-10:30am : Terrain correction, change detection, and temporal compositing
10:30-10:45am : Break
10:45-12:00pm : Linear trend fitting; supervised classification
12:00-01:00pm : Lunch
01:00-02:00pm : Working with the Hansen global forest cover dataset
02:00-02:15pm : Break
02:15-05:00pm : Working with the new 25-year Nepal tree cover/change dataset

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