Student information

MSc thesis topic: Estimating Foregone Forest Loss around a REDD project

Carbon financing through REDD projects have become a core tool to help fight climate change. Many projects have been implemented over the past decades with varying degrees of success in helping prevent deforestation. In this project, we are interested in estimating deforestation rates for a National Park in West Africa, looking both at changes in the park boundaries as well as in the buffer zone. Ultimately, the aim is to estimate long term changes in deforestation rates due to a REDD project. The project builds on earlier work, which used annual 30 x 30 m deforestation data from Hansen et al. (2013) and linked forest loss to specific project villages. In the current study, we seek to enhance the robustness of deforestation estimates and compare various deforestation detection datasets and algorithms.

This project would be a joint effort between the social sciences and geo-information sciences.

Objectives and Research questions

• Identify data sources and synthesis of data that can help estimate deforestation levels in a National Park in West Africa and its buffer zone.
• Develop a method to benchmark the accuracy of different deforestation detection datasets and algorithms.
• Estimate annual rate of deforestation and establish drivers of deforestation in the study area.
• Analyze spatial and temporal patterns of deforestation over past decades
• Identify and analyze the primary drivers of deforestation

Requirements

• Geo-scripting course
• Remote Sensing
• Advanced Earth Observation

Theme(s): Sensing & measuring