MRV Manual presented at SilvaCarbon-GFOI Southeast Asia Regional Workshop
FCMC continued the communication and feedback process for the FCMC REDD+ Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) Manual, with presentations and discussions held during the SilvaCarbon-GFOI Second Regional Workshop on Forest Monitoring for Southeast Asia in Kathmandu, Nepal from June 23-27, 2014. The workshop was organized by SilvaCarbon, Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI), Nepal Department of Forest Research and Survey, and USAID-Nepal. The workshop focused on the integration of remote sensing, forest inventory data and models for forest monitoring programs and was attended by representatives from government agencies of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as US Forest Service, US Geological Survey and academic and technical experts. Rishi Das, FCMC’s MRV Senior Analyst, attended the workshop and presented the REDD+ MRV Manual and discussed forest monitoring program needs and FCMC resources for capacity-building on MRV.
During the first few sessions of the workshop, country representatives presented updates on their national forest monitoring programs, as well as the status of REDD+ MRV systems for the REDD+ countries. Most representatives were from forest departments or national remote sensing organizations, and there was productive discussion on the design and challenges for building national forest monitoring systems from multiple perspectives. FCMC’s REDD+ MRV Manual, as well as other materials on REDD+ capacity building, were presented to the audience. Several country representatives accessed the Manual online through FCMC’s website, and feedback forms were distributed to all of the attendees. Many participants found the Manual very user-friendly and accessible to a variety of stakeholders in the process of building MRV systems. FCMC has continued the feedback interaction with some countries following the workshop. As FCMC is currently revising and preparing Version 2 of the REDD+ MRV Manual, the MRV team will incorporate feedback from workshop participants and experts into Version 2.
The workshop also featured expert presentations on a variety of methods for assessing forest cover and forest biomass and carbon, as well as presentations on newer technologies and methods such as the remote sensing technology LIDAR, flux tower intensive measurements, and models for integrating a variety of data sources for forest inventories. During the last two days of the workshop, the group traveled to a field site at Dhulikhel to visit a community-managed forest, and test forest inventory tools and techniques. The workshop featured presentations by local community members, and expert demonstrations of new tools like a terrestrial scanning LIDAR unit for scanning forest biomass. On the final day, the US Forest Service presented their forest inventory design tool, and a comparison of methods for forest plot biomass assessments
