CTrees

CTrees is headed to New York Climate Week, and we hope to see you there!🌎 With Brazil hosting COP30 in #Belém next year, global attention is turning towards the important role of #forests in addressing climate change and the urgent need to finance their protection. Join us on Tuesday, September 24, for an in-person panel discussion focused on action needed to ensure that jurisdictional carbon finance is a cornerstone of climate action. Policy leaders and scientific experts on this year's panel include: Carlos A. Nobre, Ph.D., Senior Researcher, Institute for Advanced Studies, USP - Universidade de São Paulo; Co-Chair, Science Panel for the Amazon Sassan Saatchi, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech; co-founder and CEO, CTrees Frances Seymour, U.S. Science Envoy, Office of the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, U.S. Department of State Mary Grady, Executive Director, Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART)(to be confirmed) Professor Lee White CBE, Ph.D., Special Envoy, Science Panel for the Congo Basin (moderator) Spots are limited and advanced registration is required. Register today: https://lu.ma/2aqhk9kd

#LUCA IN ACTION: The government of Laos aims to restore 70% of the country’s forest cover by 2025, but the effects of shifting cultivation are making this goal hard to reach. Shifting cultivation is an agricultural practice in which plots of land are temporarily cultivated, abandoned, and left to regenerate during a fallow period. In the last three decades, shifting cultivation has become the leading cause of forest disturbance in Laos. Population growth and the recent construction of a railroad connecting Laos with China have further increased pressure on the country’s forests. Data from our Land Use Change Alerts (LUCA) platform reveals that the area of forest disturbance in the Luang Prabang province reached 72,756 total hectares, an area roughly the size of New York City, in the second quarter of 2023. This is the highest quarterly total for the province since LUCA data became available in 2018. With its biweekly alerts, LUCA shows where and when forest disturbance takes place in Luang Prabang and beyond. 🌎 Access and explore the LUCA platform: https://lnkd.in/gJQZC2Ka 🌾 Read more on the challenges of monitoring shifting cultivation in Laos: https://lnkd.in/eugVAMZv 🚄 Learn more about the impact of new train lines on forests in the region: https://lnkd.in/eHKnnBSU LUCA allows users to visualize and quantify alerts in any administrative area or custom boundary. Based on ESA Sentinel-1 radar data, and backed by a peer-reviewed scientific methodology, the platform provides biweekly forest land use change alerts for all forest biomes. Development of LUCA is led by CTrees research scientist Adugna Mullissa, Ph.D. 📝 Find further information on the methodology behind LUCA: https://lnkd.in/gWQMb_nP

CTrees is excited to share that Professor Lee White CBE has joined our board of directors. A forest ecologist and former minister in Gabon, White has over 40 years of experience in natural resource conservation and policy, focused primarily on Central Africa. In July 2024, White was appointed as special envoy to the Science Panel for the Congo Basin. He previously served as Minister of Water, Forests, Sea, and Environment for Gabon, director of Gabon’s National Parks Agency, and Central Africa regional director of Wildlife Conservation Society. White has also served as a member of CTrees’ scientific advisory board since 2022. “CTrees is undertaking urgent work to produce data at the resolution, frequency, and quality needed to help governments and organizations protect and restore forest ecosystems at scale,” said White. “I am honored to join the board and support the organization in its mission to bring best-in-class science to advance nature-based climate solutions.” 📰 Read the full press release: https://lnkd.in/e4Q9VzXb

“We are at the brink of making significant changes — both in scientific innovation and in how the global community is thinking about and using data.” In a recent conversation with Climate TRACE, CTrees’ CEO and co-founder Sassan Saatchi discusses our innovative work to track global #emissions from the forestry and land use sector. A scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the past 30 years, Saatchi has dedicated his career to understanding the relationship between forests and the climate. With #forests covering roughly 30% of Earth’s land area and contributing nearly 80% of the carbon exchange between land and atmosphere, actions to protect and restore these ecosystems are critical to effectively mitigating climate change. 🌎 Climate TRACE is a coalition of NGOs that produces a groundbreaking open inventory of global greenhouse gas emissions. Since 2022, CTrees has provided all emissions data for the forestry and land use sector within the inventory. The joint effort provides companies and governments with science-based data for carbon tracking, reporting, and designing emissions-reduction strategies. 🔗 Learn more and read the full interview at: https://lnkd.in/gETd-hXx

CTrees was selected last year as a winner of the competitive Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant. Since then, the grant has supported our work to produce operational data for policymakers and decision makers around the world 🌎 Congratulations to our head of data & products, Aleena Ashary, for leading the way on this work! 👏 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/ggHNvseC

Looking to stay up-to-date on scientific breakthroughs, data and insights from CTrees?🌳 Each month, our newsletter brings cutting-edge research and news straight to your inbox: https://lnkd.in/eSq8g5ND From investigating forest alerts in Liberia to mapping live carbon across the forests of Gabon, coverage within our newsletters keeps you informed on our latest findings and publications. Subscribe now and stay tuned for our upcoming July newsletter📰 https://lnkd.in/eSq8g5ND

The CTrees team gathered last month at UCLA for our annual retreat, where we discussed how to translate science into actionable data for forest protection and restoration. Over two days at the botanical garden and law school, our team reflected on achievements from CTrees' first two years as a nonprofit: 🔹 Launching groundbreaking data tools mapping carbon on land for every country worldwide and providing alerts for land use change in all forests globally.  🔹 Building an innovative data platform for carbon and activity, recognized with an AWS IMAGINE Grant for Nonprofits. 🔹 Establishing partnerships with leading organizations and agencies working to address deforestation and restore ecosystems worldwide. 🔹 Growing our team to more than 30 experts in science, technology, data engineering, and policy. We explored the next phase for CTrees and reaffirmed our commitment to building accessible and actionable #RemoteSensing data solutions for policy and markets to implement #NaturalClimateSolutions. Thank you to the staff at UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden and Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment who supported the retreat. Photos by Daniel Melling.

NEWS: CTrees researchers have produced the most detailed and accurate map of live carbon for the forests of #Gabon, measuring carbon density in every hectare of forest across the #CongoBasin country. Published in Environmental Research Letters last month, the study was led by Le Bienfaiteur Sagang, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and research scientist at CTrees. 🔹 Read a press release: https://lnkd.in/g7Muthfg 🔹 See the paper: https://lnkd.in/gB_58i67 Accurate measurements of biomass carbon are critical for Gabon’s efforts to fund its efforts to protect forests through carbon markets. To date, scientists in Gabon have used conventional field inventory approaches, taking measurements from a few hundred field plots to generate estimates of forest biomass across the country. But ground-based approaches are inherently limited by the availability of plot data and the cost of intensive field campaigns. The new approach detailed in the study combined satellite and ground measurements with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to produce a wall-to-wall map for the year 2020. Results: 🔸 4 billion tons of live carbon was stored in Gabon’s forests in 2020. 🔸 The country’s managed forests had a live carbon density that was 20 percent higher on average than its unmanaged ones. 🔸 Logging concessions cover about 64% of Gabon’s area and contain 68% of the country’s total live carbon. 🔸 The map is highly accurate, with an estimated nationwide average carbon density <1% different from reference datasets available over the country. 🔸The map outperforms all global biomass datasets in resolution and accuracy, suggesting carbon maps produced at the national level can be readily integrated in the country's reporting commitments to UNFCCC. “Our results show the importance of integrating in-situ datasets into large-scale carbon maps,” said Sagang. “With this approach, we built the most accurate living carbon estimates for every hectare of forest across Gabon. This study is an invitation to countries across the Congo Basin to develop similar efforts of mapping forest carbon.” The research was funded by the U.S. Forest Service, and involved the collaboration of Gabonese institutions including the Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux (ANPN), Agence Gabonaise d’Etudes et d’Observations Spatiales (AGEOS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (CENAREST), and Ministère des Eaux, des Forêts, de la Mer, de l’Environnement (MINEF), with U.S. research partners at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

📣 🛰 New paper that i collaborated with my friend Le Bien brings the most accurate #Carbon map of #Gabon to date based on #GEDI & #MachineLearning, verified using #ALS & National Plot Inventory, and shows its variability in the landscape and in forest management Link: https://lnkd.in/gw_VjZ6v UCLA IOES / CTrees

CTrees will be at IEEE #IGARSS2024, July 7-12, 2024, in Athens, Greece, joining more than 2,500 scientists and professionals in #RemoteSensing for discussions under the theme of sustainability and resilience. Join our research scientists Le Bienfaiteur Sagang, Ph.D. for a technical session on Gabon's forest carbon and Adugna Mullissa, Ph.D., for a technical session on tropical forest mapping using Sentinel-1. Details: TU2.R7.6 | Evaluation of the Impact of Forest Management on Carbon Sink in the Congo Basin Location: MC3 Hall Date/Time: Tuesday, July 9, 12:50 - 13:04 Link: https://lnkd.in/gtSj3dkW TH4.R12.6 | Sentinel-1 SAR Based Weakly Supervised Learning For Tropical Forest Mapping Location: MC 3.4 Date/Time: Thursday, July 11, 18:30 - 18:44 Link: https://lnkd.in/gmKWScXg Conference details: https://lnkd.in/gXBhKksa