Mapping and Monitoring of Tree Resources Outside the Forest in Central America

Abstract

This paper presents the remote sensing part of the INCO-DC-project TROF(Tree Resources Outside Forest). The project concentrates on singletrees and small groups of trees which do not come under the definitionof forest. These tree resources play an important role especially in thetropics, where, e.g., agroforestry systems are fulfilling manyecological functions (e.g. conservation of biodiversity, erosioncontrol, carbon sequestration) and economic functions (e.g. provision offirewood). Currently these tree resources are not included in commonforest inventories. Their importance increases with continuingdestruction and fragmentation of closed forests. A method for mappingand monitoring tree resources outside forest has been developed by theproject consortium of three European partners and three partners fromCentral America. There are three field sites, one in each of the CentralAmerican countries represented in the consortium: Costa Rica, Hondurasand Guatemala. The chosen approach is a combination of remote sensingmethods and field sampling methods. Various methods of image processingare applied (segmentation, classification, image information fusion). Bythe use of satellite images of different spatial and spectralresolution, these tree resources can be mapped at different scales.