GEO-GFOI Virtual Workshop "Exploring new tools in SEPAL to assess land use and land cover changes, and produce GHG emission estimates" 16-17 June 2021

Blog / May 19, 2021

On 16-17 June, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the GEO flagship Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) will host a joint technical workshop on "Exploring new tools in SEPAL to assess land use and land cover changes, and produce GHG emission estimates", with the participation of the GFOI lead partner, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the Task Force on National GHG Inventories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-TFI).

The science and technology of cloud computing, machine learning and data cubes have evolved to meet the needs of countries as defined in the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (NGGI). It is now time to move from the realm of research and development and demonstration in a few countries to a broader operationalisation of these technologies. This is the reason for this workshop and collaboration between GEO, GFOI, FAO and IPCC-TFI.

The IPCC Technical Support Unit of the Task Force on national greenhouse gas Inventories is developing tools to support the use of its Inventory software by Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in preparing their land representation, including through spatially explicit approaches, for estimating greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector and has invited the cooperation of GEO and GFOI on this matter.

GEO and GFOI have identified the System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring (SEPAL) platform, operated by FAO and funded by GFOI partner Norway, as an environment that can enable UNFCCC Parties and GEO Members with significant forest areas to access cloud computing services. GEO and GFOI aim to provide high quality open source software available in SEPAL that perform spatially explicit accounts of AFOLU emissions.

The goal of the workshop is to identify tools suitable for spatially explicit monitoring of land cover change that can support greenhouse gas accounting in the land sector. The workshop will identify specific open source software packages to be made freely available on the SEPAL platform for governments wishing to develop National Forest Monitoring Systems (NFMS) and associated Measurement Reporting and Verification (MRV) procedures, including appropriate capacity development support.

The workshop will be held virtually via Zoom. To register, please follow this link.

For more information, please contact Sara Venturini, Climate Coordinator at the GEO Secretariat (sventurini@geosec.org), and Tom Harvey, GFOI Office Manager (tom.harvey@gfoi.org).

Draft Agenda:

Day 1 - 16 June 12:00 - 15:00 CET (View recording here)
Welcome and opening
10 min	Gilberto Camara, GEO Secretariat Director Tom Harvey, GFOI Office Manager Opening remarks and introduction to the initiative
5 min	Julian Fox, FAO, NFM Team Leader Opening remarks
5 min	Lucia Perugini, GEO Climate Change Working Group Co-Chair Opening remarks
Setting the scene on AFOLU GHG estimates
15 min	Sandro Federici, Head of IPCC TFI Technical Support Unit Introduction to IPCC Approach 3 and wall-to-wall method
10 min	Carly Green, consultant to the IPCC TFI Technical Support Unit Ongoing work on the add-on for land representation of the IPCC Inventory Software, existing related technical challenges and opportunities for cooperation
10 min	Adam Lewis, Digital Earth Africa Current status and availability of AFOLU data monitoring tools in DE Africa
10 min	Laura Duncanson, GEO-TREES State of the art on biomass data availability for GHG emissions estimates
20 min	Q&A
20 min	Short break
Software demonstrations in SEPAL
15 min	Erik Lindquist and Rémi d’Annunzio, Forestry Officers at FAO Introducing the SEPAL platform
15 min	Rémi d’Annunzior, FAO/SEPAL and Jan Verbesselt, University of Wageningen BFAST
5 min	Q&A
15 min	Karine Ferreira, Rolf Simoes and Gilberto Queiroz, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) SITS
5 min	Q&A
Discussion
15 min	Moderated discussion by Gilberto Camara, GEO Secretariat Initial reflections on collaborations

Day 2 - 17 June 12:00 - 15:00 CET (View recording here)
Opening
5 min	Gilberto Camara, GEO Secretariat Director Welcome back and summary of Day 1
Software demonstrations in SEPAL
15 min	Curtis Woodcock and Paulo Arevalo, University of Boston Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC)
5 min	Q&A
15 Min	David Gibbs, WRI Global forest carbon flux model
5 min	Q&A
20 min	Short break
15 min	Andreas Johannes Langner, EC JRC Forest Canopy Disturbance Monitoring (FCDM)
5 min	Q&A
15 min	Dario Simonetti, EC JRC Sentinel-2 cloud-free annual composites for REDD+
5 min	Q&A
Discussion and next steps
50 min	Moderated discussion by Gilberto Camara, GEO Secretariat Director Initial reflections on usability of software on SEPAL for AFOLU GHG emission estimates Support and resources requirements Post-workshop process and timeline
5 min	Closing