Remote sensing monitoring of FSC forests

Сreation of a first stage of geographic information system to monitor forest plots certified by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

FSC certification system implies sustainable and responsible forest management, which in turn requires information on exact boundaries of leased plots and their subdivision on forest management units in agreement with indicator 7.4.1 of Russian national standard (version 6) together with indicators 7.1.4, 7.1.5 and 7.1.16. The presence of such data in open access and availability of easy to use tools for monitoring will set basis to improve transparency, effective audit and responsible reporting by forest enterprises for various stakeholders. The same data and tools can also be used by enterprises themselves for improving control or their acitivities and management.

The objective of the project entitled “Facilitating monitoring of large forestry enterprises in Russia using remote sensing data” was to collect information and build tools for effective data analysis. The project was carried out by NextGIS and Biodiversity Conservation Center under collaboration with FSC Russia and financial support from Embassy of Netherlands’ MATRA program.

Main results:

  • Geospatial data was created for 70 out of 123 certified forest plots
  • New free and opensource software to detect changes on certified areas using remote sensing data (more)
  • New free and opensource software for quick statistics generation (more)
  • Change analysis for 20 plots to detect forest logging and fires during the lease period (more)
  • Analysis of  forest management data for administrative regions of Russia available via web (forest plans and forest regulations) (more)

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