CTrees’ Post

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.

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

Headed to the 2024 Latin America Climate Summit next week? CTrees' head of marketing Daniel Melling will join a panel discussion on Technology Platforms and Digital Monitoring-Reporting-Verification (MRV), on Thursday, June 27, at 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (Breakout 8), along with speakers from ClearBlue Markets, Pachama, S&P Global, and Climate Action Data Trust. Reach out to Daniel on LinkedIn or the conference app to set up a meeting. Thank you to conference organizers IETA and ASOCARBONO for including CTrees in the agenda. #LACS2024

ALERTS: In Liberia's border area with Côte d’Ivoire, CTrees' Land Use Change Alerts (LUCA) platform detected forest clearing in Q1 2024 at more than 3x the historical average. Aijing Li, CTrees' research & engagement specialist, writes: In West Africa, cocoa production supports the livelihoods of around 2 million smallholder farmers but has also driven deforestation in the Upper Guinean forest. About half of the remaining Upper Guinean forest lies within Liberia. Although forest clearance has predominantly occurred in major cocoa-producing countries like Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the Upper Guinean forest in Liberia is also under increasing threat. According to a recent report from nonprofit IDEF, migrants from Côte d’Ivoire are moving to Liberia in search of fertile and affordable land for cocoa production. Leveraging Land Use Change Alerts (LUCA), CTrees’ forest monitoring tool, and its ability to analyze areas of interest, we investigated a custom region encompassing the area in Grand Gedeh County, Liberia, within 20 miles of the Côte d’Ivoire border. Our findings were concerning: In Q1 2024, 4,177 hectares of forest were cleared, 3.5 times the historical average for the same period from 2019 to 2023. While we cannot attribute the drivers of such clearance, LUCA shows a concerning trend in one of the last patches of the Upper Guinean forest. West Africa is the dominant supplier of cocoa globally, with Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana together contributing approximately 82% of the market share. LUCA has detected 2.7 million hectares of forest cover change in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana since 2018, an area the size of Massachusetts. LUCA features include: ♦ See change alerts in all forest biomes: tropical humid, tropical dry, temperate, and boreal ♦ Visualize and quantify alerts in any administrative area ♦ Draw or upload an area of interest ♦ Automatically aggregate data on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis ♦ Quantify historical alerts ♦ Track changes in emerging hotspots and pinpoint sites for ground investigation and interventions. Development of LUCA is led by CTrees research scientist Adugna Mullissa, Ph.D. Sources:  LUCA platform: https://lnkd.in/gJQZC2Ka LUCA methodology: https://lnkd.in/gNwfE2Ji IDEF study: https://lnkd.in/g3R4T4iU Reuters story on cocoa farming in Liberia: https://lnkd.in/gtg_vpvx Climate Focus report on smallholder cocoa farmers: https://lnkd.in/gKS5DfS3

CTrees is pleased to welcome Bobby Braswell, Ph.D., as its first chief technology officer. Braswell brings more than 30 years of experience in scientific research and applied data solutions using remote sensing for measuring ecosystems and agriculture. As CTO, Braswell will lead CTrees’ efforts to produce operational data products that measure, report, and verify the impact of natural climate solutions like forest protection, landscape restoration, and agroforestry. “As a scientist and product builder, Rob has the perfect experience to support CTrees’ efforts to translate science into data on carbon and activity in the world’s ecosystems,” said Sassan Saatchi, Ph.D., CTrees’ CEO. “Rob will accelerate our work to release practical data products that are easy to use, fast, and cost effective for agencies and organizations implementing nature-based solutions worldwide.” Read the press release: https://lnkd.in/gvxeN9KB Photo credit: Daniel Melling

To date, forest alert products have mostly covered the humid tropics, limiting the availability of near-real-time data on the global effects of deforestation, industrial timber harvesting, selective logging, fragmentation, fire, and roads. To address this data gap, CTrees launched the free Land Use Change Alerts (LUCA) product last fall as the first radar-based alert system to cover all forest biomes. LUCA provides reliable alerts every two weeks for humid and dry tropics, as well as temperate and boreal forest areas. In a paper published in Remote Sensing this week, Adugna Mullissa, Ph.D., lead scientist, explores the methodology, validation, and results from LUCA. Read the paper: https://lnkd.in/gWQMb_nP LUCA detects forest land use changes in all forest biomes in unprecedented detail and accuracy, Mullissa concludes, providing a valuable tool for policy and law enforcement. Explore LUCA data: https://lnkd.in/gJQZC2Ka Co-authors of the paper include Sassan Saatchi, Ricardo Dalagnol da Silva, Tyler Erickson, Naomi Provost, Fiona Osborn, Aleena Ashary, Violet Moon, & Daniel Melling.

CTrees research scientist Le Bienfaiteur Sagang, Ph.D. was in Kinshasa this week for 20th meeting of parties to the Congo Basin Forest Partnership / Partenariat pour les Forêts du Bassin du Congo, a collaboration of 13 countries in Africa and more than 100 partner agencies and organizations focused on sustainable management of forests and economic development. Sagang presented on remote sensing techniques for measuring carbon and activity in forests at an event sponsored by USAID and the U.S. Forest Service. And Sagang spoke at a roundtable on the One Forest Vision initiative (https://lnkd.in/eCX_zwNC), a scientific collaboration between six major French research institutions and tropical forest countries. CTrees' open data tools for measuring country and state level carbon and activity include Jurisdictional MRV (https://lnkd.in/gh9XVErK) and Land Use Change Alerts (LUCA) (https://lnkd.in/gJQZC2Ka). In addition, CTrees is collaborating with national ministries to pair science and policy for forest inventories, jurisdictional REDD, and other management programs. Learn more about our work with AGEOS in Gabon: https://lnkd.in/eph-Kym2 #MOP20