Development of Forest Monitoring Systems Methodsand Forest Degradation Issues in Mozambique
Joaquim A. Macuacua (Forestry Ministry of Land Environment
and Rural Development, Mozambique)

Session 1

Development of Forest Monitoring Systems Methods and Forest Degradation Issues inMozambique
Joaquim A. Macuacua (Forestry Ministry of Land Environment and Rural Development,Mozambique)

Before I start my presentation, I would like to thank FFPRI for inviting me to come and share ourexperience in Mozambique.
Objectives and Inputs

93Session 1Mozambique is a small country with almost 800,000 sq km.

Our recent forest national inventory

showed the deforestation rate to be 0.79% and 39 million hectares of forest.

My objective is to show the development of potential improved methodologies for satellite monitoringof tropical dry forest and focusing on issues of deforestation and forest degradation in order to doassessment of monitoring of forest for REDD+.

The aim of our output is enhancing national

monitoring, updating forest monitoring, building relationship between forest management, and contributing
to existing country project and other problems.

94Development of Forest Monitoring Systems Methods
and Forest Degradation Issues in Mozambique
Joaquim A. Macuacua (Forestry Ministry of Land Environment
and Rural Development, Mozambique)

Session 1

The specific objective is to differentiate the effects of deforestation, the land area affected bydegradation, define the nature of deforestation looking at the drivers of deforestation.

For that, we had toselect among many definitions of forest degradation, and we picked up the IPCC definition.
Methodology Used

In terms of methodology, we followed boundary mapping and pixel-based detection, and did lot ofGround Truth survey test of all of methodologies in order to find the best threshold.

We also did supportof institutions like Tokyo Denki University1 and to improve the JJ-FAST2 methodology.
supported by the LTS International3 alongside Edinburgh University4 and European Space5.

https://www.dendai.ac.jp/en/
https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/jjfast/
3 https://www.ltsi.co.uk/
4 https://www.ed.ac.uk/
5 https://www.esa.int/ESA
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We were also

Session 1

In terms of remote sensing activities, everything started from the theory to understand radar images
acquisition.

We went to the understanding of the constituents of the infrared, visual and automatic

detections, Ground Truth for validation and evaluation of the linear value.

We did all this work during job

training exercises.

For those one of familiar with what it mean by the issue of reflectance of forests in order to detect thechange.

Here I just wrote a small picture of decrease of deforestation by doing plantation.

deforestation sites are those that indicate decrease of back-scattering of radar waves.
return sites with light color and lower return with dark color

96

TheTherefore, higher

Development of Forest Monitoring Systems Methods
and Forest Degradation Issues in Mozambique
Joaquim A. Macuacua (Forestry Ministry of Land Environment
and Rural Development, Mozambique)

Session 1

To get the results, we had to do field ground survey which considered 76 samples within 6 provinces as
you can see in red.

In the field, we identified the deforested area, and then with GPS we tried to work around thedeforested area.

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Session 1

Then back in the office we found the threshold and did statistical analysis to find the linear value of thedeforestation area in Mozambique using 2008-2010 information of Mozambique.

For that, we had to align with wall to wall map to see the activity data in order to ascertain what
contributes to forest deforestation.

In the analysis of the target area, we found that shifting cultivation is

the major contributor among many drivers of deforestation in Mozambique.

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Development of Forest Monitoring Systems Methods
and Forest Degradation Issues in Mozambique
Joaquim A. Macuacua (Forestry Ministry of Land Environment
and Rural Development, Mozambique)

Session 1

We used another method developed by JRC in Ispra6, Italy, which consist of grid interpretation using
pixel 3x3, where we identified how many pixels changed/not changed within the interval of less than 70%
or greater than 70% which has deforestation and forest degradation.
the IMPACT tool and GUIDOS.
their precision.

We were not familiar with these tools, but we tried to use it to ascertain

Unfortunately, we did not get financial source to go to the field to recheck this, so it

remained as one of the challenges.

6

The methodology is applied using

https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/about/jrc-site/ispra

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Session 1

Recently, we had another Ground Truth to support JJ-FAST method developed by Tokyo Denki
University in order to improve the system.
cultivation in a very small area.
evaluate the deforestation.

This is because our major driver of deforestation is shifting

We would like to see this method reflecting those small areas in order to

We went to the field and left some instruments there to measure soil humidity

and trees.

We used Collect Earth method extensively.

This is a less costly method, which has a huge bunch ofsatellite data from Google Earth, Bing Map, Earth Engine Explorer, and Code Editor Repository.

Using

this method which is a statistical grid interpretation, we found that within the interval of 2003 and 2015,2010 was the major year of deforestation.

But we found that this deforestation is decreasing after 2014.

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Development of Forest Monitoring Systems Methods
and Forest Degradation Issues in Mozambique
Joaquim A. Macuacua (Forestry Ministry of Land Environment
and Rural Development, Mozambique)

Session 1

Key Challenges Faced

In terms of challenges, we found more challenge in degradations compared to deforestation.

We seethe issues of long-term effects; exclusion of deforestation; loss of the carbon stocks; and the issue of how
to measure green gas inventory using those tools.

We have seen that the provision of technology like

unnamed aerial vehicles or drone platforms to acquire both LiDAR and VHSR image is needed to support
this kind of information.

Lastly, for small areas, we found drone is efficient at detecting changes in forest

at low cost.
Conclusion

101Session 1

In conclusion, we found wall to wall as the best method to produce a deforestation map.

We alsofound that to compare deforestation and forest degradation using RADAR and ScanSAR is possible, but itneeds support of the Ground Truth.

Collect Earth also needs a Ground Truth survey and it requires agood knowledge by the technicians who are doing this interpretation.
say, crops with land use and call it as deforestation.

Otherwise, they can misunderstand,Lastly, scanning of deforested area using drone is agood method for inaccessible areas compared to satellite data with low resolution.

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