Tropical forest remote sensing services for the Democratic Republic Of Congo case inside the EU FP7 ‘ReCover’ project (1st iteration)

This paper is an overview of the 2000-2010 single-year remote sensing product results, used methods and assessment of the first iteration service delivery to the user of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Observatoir Satellitale des Forêts d'Afrique Centrale (OSFAC), as part of ‘ReCover’ project. The results are based on a first approach, satellite data analysis and adaption of current methods, and will be improved through a review/validation process and further method development for the final service delivery due in summer 2013. The delivered products are image mosaics and forest/non-forest maps (FNF) based on optical satellite data from Landsat-7 and ALOS AVNIR-2 for the years 2001 and 2010, respectively, and space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from ERS-2 for 2000, Envisat ASAR for 2005 and a combination of Envisat ASAR and ALOS Palsar (C- and L-band, respectively) for 2010. FNF maps have been validated with very high resolution (VHR) Kompsat-2 data and all FNF maps, but from ERS-2, had an accuracy of >85%. One biomass map has also been produced based on ICESat GLAS data from 2003-2009 and corrected with SRTM v4.0.