Hotel Himalaya, Kathmandu, Nepal,
November 29-30, 2018
Meeting location: Hotel Himalaya, Kathmandu, Nepal
Meeting dates: Thursday November 29 to Friday November 30, 2018
Regional Support Organizations: Resources Himalaya Foundation and ForestAction
International Support Organization: NASA South Asia Research Initiative
Dates: November 29-30: Science meeting
December 3-4: Hands-on workshop with Google Earth Engine; training in accessing and analyzing annual, nation-wide tree cover data. Led by Jamon Van Den Hoek (Oregon State University), Kaspar Hurni (University of Bern), and Alexander Smith (Oregon State University)
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:
Hotel Himalaya Kupondole Height, Lalitpur, Kahtmandu, Nepal 1-866-599-6674 https://hotelhimalaya.com.np/
TBA
Scientific Presentations
