Forest cover mapping in Central Asia

Keywords

Desert forest, mountainous forest, riparian forest, agroforestry, remote sensing, MODIS, Landsat

Countries

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan

Summary

Central Asia compromises diverse climatic and biotic zones with various agricultural and forest ecosystems. Although occupying a relative small fraction of the land, forests are crucial elements of the regional ecologies and important carbon sinks. Spatially accurate inventory of current forest cover in Central Asia is largely missing because of the disruption in regular, standardized inventories after the break-up of the Soviet Union. With the release of coarse resolution satellite imagery (e.g. MODIS) and the open access to fine resolution archive (e.g. Landsat), initiatives of global land cover mapping have evolved rapidly but the existing global products remain to be validated for the Central Asian region. Our project aims to map forest/ tree cover in Central Asia for providing the basis for a range of applications, such as quantifying of biomass and carbon stocks. In particular, we intend to (i) evaluate most widely used land cover/ tree cover products using inter-comparisons approach and (ii) develop a regionalized procedure to map forest/ tree cover in Central Asia using Landsat and MODIS imagery.

(see Figure right column: MODIS and Landsat scenes used in the assessment)

Methodology

Random Forest, Geostatistics, Spatial analysis, Time series analysis

Main Cooperation Partners

• Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
• Republican Science and Production Center for Decorative Gardening and Forestry, Uzbekistan
• Urgench State University, Uzbekistan
• Khorezm Rural Advisory Support Service (NGO KRASS), Uzbekistan
• State Agency of Environment Protection and Forestry, Kyrgyzstan

Main Funding Partners

• Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) through the Coordinated Research Project (CRP) “Forests, Trees and Agroforestry”
• Robert Bosch Foundation

Duration of the Project

1 June 2014 - 31 August 2015

Team

• <link http: www.zef.de _blank external-link-new-window external link in new>Prof. Dr. Asia Khamzina
• <link http: www.zef.de _blank external-link-new-window external link in new>Dr. He Yin
• Susanne Haas, M.Sc.
• Alexander Li, M.Sc.
• Murodjon Sultanov, M.Sc.
• Dr. Christopher Martius