Friday, March 5, 2010

Modeling Deforestation in the Bolivian Lowlands Species and Carbon Impacts - Introduction

Introduction

With the importance of tropical forests for climate system function and biodiversity, land cover change in the Amazon has been the focus of intensive research. In Bolivia, the rate of deforestation is second only to that of Brazil. Due in part to a tremendous amount of economic growth in recent decades, the Bolivian Lowlands have seen forest loss of almost 3 million hectares between the years of 1992 and 2004, with two-thirds of this loss coming between 2001 and 2004 alone. With forests dominating over 50% of the land cover in lowland Bolivia, special planning tools are essential to manage, monitor and prioritize the risks associated with economic development and to assist the conservation community better understand the changes and impacts that are taking place. This poster demonstrates a set of techniques to assess land cover change, predict future scenarios, and assess the potential impacts of these scenarios on biodiversity and carbon loss. These techniques will be demonstrated using the tool Land Change Modeler (LCM) as found in the IDRISI GIS and Image Processing system.

2 comments:

  1. Dear all,

    These technologies used for monitoring are heavily contested by human rights advocates. With them, it may be possible for industry or governments to cherry pick the biodiversity they currently regard as important while discounting and discarding the rest. Further, the technology will allow the tracking of the people in
    the forest, which in turn may influence land rights negotiations.

    Additionally, the ability to assess the total biomass and its carbon value renders the biodiversity irrelevant and only the biomass commercially important.

    See more information on:

    http://noredd.makenoise.org/

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is one awesome blog post.Really thank you!

    Mathematica

    ReplyDelete