Training workshop on the Activity Data Generation for Forest Reference Level/ Forest Reference Emission Level (FRL/FREL) reporting
A four day training workshop on Activity Data Generation for Forest Reference Level/ Forest Reference Emission Level (FRL/FREL) reporting is underway at Hotel Ariya. The workshop which started from 14th of August is jointly organized by Watershed Management Division ( WMD) and Forest Resources Management Division (FRMD) of the Department of Forests & Park Services (DoFPS) in coordination with FAO. The technical training workshop, which is part of the REDD+ readiness preparation is expected to contribute towards the development of FREL/ FRL. The workshop is funded from the Readiness Fund of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) of the World Bank. The participants of the training workshop which are from FRMD, WMD and UWICER, who are part of the team involved in developing the FREL/FRL for Bhutan.
The training workshop is facilitated by a resource person Dr. Remi D’annunzio of FAO HQ, Rome. The objectives of the workshop are:
- Conduct a four day training on the tools developed by FAO Forestry Department under the Open Foris initiative (openforis.org) to generate Activity Data suitable for FREL/FRL
- Present recent developments of the SEPAL platform and train project staff to use of tools designed by FAO to facilitate the production of robust, transparent and accurate activity data for FREL/FRL
- Build technical capacity in the SEPAL cloud based processing platform (https://sepal.io) that will enable to access different tools such as R, the Open Foris Geospatial Toolkit and built in applications for stratified area estimation or implementation of BFAST algorithm
- Combine three land cover maps for 1995, 2010 and 2016 produced by FRMD, to assess forest cover change over the reference period that will be chosen for the FREL. Also, identified hotspots of change will be used to carry out dense time series analysis of change through automatic methods.
The expected results from the training workshop are:
- Built technical capacities to use the SEPAL platform to process geospatial data and generate change maps suitable for activity data in the context of REDD+, with hands-on exercises performed on pilot zones of the country
Developed base/resources to finalize activity data generation at national level within the year 2017, for the construction of the FREL.