An offline ‘Geo-Fence’ application: the development of a community-based interective forest monioting mobile application for REDD+ monitoring. Data, Code, Application ( still under developmnet) and Manual accompanying the concept is inculed here.
Remote sensing is the backbone of national forest monitoring systems. For REDD+ MRV, it is important to engage local communities in monitoring and validating information provided by remote sensing. To this aim, there is a need for a systematically designed tool that can work, in an integrated nature, with remote sensing and community- based monitoring.
In this context, the Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing (GRS) at Wageningen University is currently developing and testing an interactive mobile-based forest monitoring tool in different parts of the world (e.g. Ethiopia and Peru). The developed interactive forest monitoring (IFM) tool incorporates user-friendly design; has the potential to facilitate near-real-time forest change alerts based on remote sensing analysis; and can provide data collection, storage and processing in partnership with local communities.
This open-source tool allows for near-real-time forest monitoring:
• It aims to bridge the gap between remote sensing and community-based monitoring in an interactive fashion. The tool allows monitoring of forest cover guided by a database and allows for the verification or reporting of what is happening in a particular area.
• The mobile phone connects with the GPS and constantly reads the position of the surveyor. When the tool senses that it is in the proximity of a polygon in need of validation, a data collection map will pop up in the mobile screen to tell the surveyor to collect and share relevant information for that area. After receiving this alert, the surveyor can start to answer questions form. The tool also allows the user to take pictures.
• The added value is that the tool connects with the database from time to time to download local information. In the future the tool will have different plug-ins. This will be particularly useful when users are in the same area on a regular basis and do not need to actively check national deforestation data or other information.
#References Biezen JV. An offline ‘Geo-Fence’ application: the development of a citizen science mobile application for REDD+ monitoring. M.Sc. thesis,Geographical Information Management and Applications (GIMA), Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands 2015.