Conservation impacts of a near real‐time forest monitoring and alert system for the tropics

Abstract

Near real-time (NRT) forest monitoring and alert systems based on remotely sensed data are among the most recently developed tools to help manage and protect forest resources. The use of satellite and airborne remote sensing to quickly and accurately detect activities associated with deforestation has great potential for catalyzing local response teams responsible for assessing and interdicting threats to tropical forest ecosystems. To better understand the utility of NRT monitoring technologies in improving environmental protection and management, from 2008 to 2016 Conservation International conducted a series of surveys and interviews with users of these systems in four countries where wildfires threaten tropical forest ecosystems: Madagascar, Indonesia, Bolivia and Peru. Users reported that NRT forest monitoring systems made significant contributions to improving the ability of conservation and forest management organizations to respond to and reduce the impacts of fire, deforestation and other illegal or undesirable forest activity. Understanding the types of applications for which users successfully employed forest monitoring data, the challenges they faced in accessing, analyzing or disseminating these data, and the lessons learned from our attempts to develop and deploy NRT forest monitoring systems is useful to institutions interested in successfully incorporating NRT monitoring into their work.

Research challenges and opportunities for using big data in global change biology

“…The high velocity of space‐based data enables using satellite imagery to detect the abrupt occurrence of global change events and their biological impacts over large areas (Verbesselt, Zeileis, & Herold, 2012). Recently, some near real‐time monitoring systems based on space‐based data have been applied to forest conservation (Musinsky et al., 2018; Pratihast et al., 2016), flood event (Van Ackere et al., 2019), fire mapping (Pulvirenti et al., 2020), and tree mortality due to insect outbreak (He, Chen, Potter, & Meentemeyer, 2019; Olsson, Lindström, & Eklundh, 2016). Furthermore, global analyses of the big remote‐sensing data have revealed many emergent properties of ecosystems, such as the average optimum air temperature for ecosystem gross primary productivity (Huang, Piao, et al, 2019), high stability of evergreen broadleaf forests (Huang & Xia, 2019) and collapse of rain‐use efficiency in semi‐arid ecosystems (Du et al., 2018) under extreme droughts, diminishment of vegetation seasonality over northern lands (Xu et al, 2013), and constrained tropical photosynthetic seasonality by hydroclimate (Guan et al, 2015).…”

Opportunities for improving conservation early warning and alert systems

“…The first generation of CEAS applications in the early 2000s used thermal anomalies detected by coarse spatial resolution satellite sensors with multiple observations per day to monitor deforestation fires and disseminate fire locations to local decision‐makers. These decision‐makers included protected area managers, conservation practitioners, communities, policymakers and researchers (Musinsky et al, 2018). The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and Conservation International’s Fire Alert System (FAS) were two pioneering and complementary systems that prioritized information accessibility by sending data in GIS friendly and text formats directly to users’ email inboxes (Justice et al, 2002; Tabor and Hewson, 2018).…”

“…For example, FAS alerts accommodated a user’s language of choice and filtered fire information with biodiversity, land cover and land governance data to increase data relevancy and reduce data size. FAS also emphasized user‐buy‐in and ‘co‐ownership’ of systems with government agencies to build trust in the data, and continued engagement and in‐country capacity building to support tool adoption (Musinsky et al, 2018). Today, several global and national alert systems disseminate active fire data for a variety of applications including enforcing conservation and development policies, promoting public awareness of environmental issues, strategizing patrols of protected areas, and facilitating fire management (Davies et al, 2009; Musinsky et al, 2018).…”

“…Users of Rapid Response CEAS include conservation practitioners, government agencies, protected area managers and IPLCs. The information from Rapid Response CEAS are used to generate routine reports, dispatch patrols in response to threat information, and enforce land‐use policies (Musinsky et al, 2018; Weisse et al, 2019). Most rapid response tools provide generalized data for multiple applications.…”

Tropical Protected Areas Under Increasing Threats from Climate Change and Deforestation

“…Another key management tool is near real-time monitoring of ecosystem threats utilizing community-based monitoring, remotely-sensed data, or in-situ sensors. These systems enable PA managers with time-sensitive alerts on deforestation threats of fires and illegal extractives to strategically patrol protected areas and enable rapid response to prevent further ecosystem destruction (e.g., [74][75][76][77]). …”