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Open Foris Collect Earth: a remote sensing sampling survey of Azerbaijan to support climate change reporting in the land use, land use change, and forestry

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Abstract

Land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) are critical in climate change mitigation. Producing or collecting activity data for LULUCF is essential in developing national greenhouse gas inventories, national communications, biennial update reports, and nationally determined contributions to meet international commitments under climate change. Collect Earth is a free, publicly accessible software for monitoring dynamics between all land use classes: forestlands, croplands, grasslands, wetlands, settlements, and other lands. Collect Earth supports countries in monitoring the trends in land use and land cover over time by applying a sample-based approach and generating reliable, high-quality, consistent, accurate, transparent, robust, comparable, and complete activity data through augmented visual interpretation for climate change reporting. This article reports forest extent estimates in Azerbaijan, analyzing 7782 0.5-ha sampling units through an augmented visual interpretation of very high spatial and temporal resolution images on the Google Earth platform. The results revealed that in 2016, tree cover existed in 31.9% of total land, equal to 2,751,167 ha and 1,301,188 ha or 15.1% of the total land, with a 5.4% sampling error covered by forests. The estimate is 15 to 25% higher than the previous estimates, equal to 169,418 to 260,888 ha of forest that was never reported in previous studies.

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Data availability

The data supporting this study’s findings are available on request from the corresponding author, Caglar Bassullu.

Notes

  1. REDD + refers to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the role of forest conservation, sustainable management of forest, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries.

  2. https://openforis.org/tools/collect-earth/

  3. https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest/download_v1.7.html

  4. https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/2019rf/pdf/4_Volume4/19R_V4_Ch03_Land%20Representation.pdf

  5. The total area of Azerbaijan is created by CE and could differ from the official statistics.

  6. The State Forest Fund consists of forestlands, with forest vegetation/plants and forest bare soils without trees (Forest Code Article 6).

  7. https://openforis.org/tools/collect/

  8. https://earthmap.org/?aoi=az&boundary=level0&feature=union_result&layers=%7B%22HansenLossAllYears%22%3A%7B%22opacity%22%3A0.8%2C%22date%22%3A2021%7D%7D&mainmenu=true&map=%7B%22center%22%3A%7B%22lat%22%3A40.59461065899951%2C%22lng%22%3A47.8438761646364%7D

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Acknowledgements

We thank all operators who participated in the “Capacity Development Training on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry Assessment” between 21 and 31 January 2019 in Baku/Azerbaijan; Ms. Rebecca Tavani, Forestry Officer, for her kind supervision; Mr. Bariz Mehdiyev, Assistant Representative of FAO Azerbaijan, for his kind support and valuable comments that he provided; and FAO Azerbaijan staff for the organization of the capacity development training. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Funding

The Collect Earth tool was developed and is sustained in FAO with support from the Google Earth Outreach team. It is funded by the International Climate Initiative of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building, and Nuclear Safety. CE is based on Collect software, which was developed with support from the FAO-Finland Technical Cooperation Programme. The authors declare that this study received funding from the Project “Forest Resources Assessment and Monitoring to Strengthen Forest Knowledge Framework in Azerbaijan (GCP/AZE/007/GFF)” supported by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and MENR. The funders were not involved in the study design, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Caglar Bassullu

  2. Foreign Relations, Training, and Research Department, General Directorate of Forestry, Ankara, Türkiye

    Caglar Bassullu

  3. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 00153, Rome, Italy

    Alfonso Sanchez-Paus Díaz

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  1. Caglar Bassullu
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  2. Alfonso Sanchez-Paus Díaz
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Contributions

ASPD established the CE methodology and survey (area of attributes file, national grids, and Azerbaijan Mapathon (pilot CSV file)). CB designed and delivered capacity-building training; collected data; coordinated the data collection by other operators through CE; conducted the quality control, data cleansing procedure, and reassessment of inconsistent sampling units; and performed the statistical analyses. CB conceived, designed, and wrote the paper. CB and ASPD edited the manuscript. All authors contributed to the manuscript revision and read and approved the submitted version. The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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Correspondence to Caglar Bassullu.

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Bassullu, C., Sanchez-Paus Díaz, A. Open Foris Collect Earth: a remote sensing sampling survey of Azerbaijan to support climate change reporting in the land use, land use change, and forestry. Environ Monit Assess 195, 1236 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-11870-x

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