From 2/28-3/3/23, SERVIR – in coordination with SilvaCarbon and Guatemala’s Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) – held a training workshop on forest monitoring workflows in Guatemala City, Guatemala. The workshop was attended by over thirty representatives of various Guatemalan government agencies and universities, mainly institutions involved in the country’s Inter-Institutional Group for Forest Monitoring (GIMBUT).
Workshop participants were introduced to the Bayesian Updating of Land Cover-Deforestation (BULC-D), Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC), and LandTrendr algorithms, which have all been implemented in the cloud via the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. In addition to these methodologies, workshop participants were also acquainted with preliminary Guatemala results from the SERVIR-CArbon Pilot (S-CAP) activity. The activity’s ultimate objective is to support the integration of these new methods into the Government of Guatemala’s forest Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification system.
From the SERVIR Science Coordination Office, the in-person instructors were Africa Flores-Anderson, Lauren Carey, and Christine Evans, with virtual contributions from Emil Cherrington, Betzy Hernandez, Natalia Bermudez, and Nina Copeland. SERVIR Applied Science Team PI Robert Kennedy of Oregon State University, Ph.D. student Katelyn Tarrio of Boston University, and Professor Jeffrey Cardille and Flavie Pelettier of McGill University were co-instructors, while Monica Jeada of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the SilvaCarbon program also supported the event.
The workshop is considered a lead up activity toward the anticipated SERVIR Central America hub, and was also attended by Luis Ramos, an environment specialist from USAID’s Central America and Mexico regional mission, which is based in El Salvador.
