GLAD

As part of the SilvaCarbon Initiative, The University of Maryland and USGS will work with colleagues in governmental institutions in three countries (Nepal, Cameroon and Guatemala) on enhancing land cover and forest monitoring in support of national carbon accounting programs. This work includes the development of forest extent and change maps from 2000 to present, and assisting partners on product derivation, and iteration. The University of Maryland will create a data time series by mining the entire Landsat archive from 2000 to present and include temporal metrics used in classification and change detection; and install, test, and deliver the methodology to the three countries. The University of Maryland's responsibility is to work in collaboration with USGS and country partners to transfer the capacity on processing methods to include radiometric corrections, quality assessment, time-integrated spectral feature derivation, characterization algorithms, integration strategies, product development and iteration, sampling schemes, and methods for validation. Annual forest cover disturbance maps will be generated for the three countries.

The countries' institutions are:
Nepal - Department of Forest Research and Survey (DFRS)
Cameroon - Ministry of the Environment, Protection of Nature and Sustainable Development (MINEPDED)
Guatemala - Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN)