Abstract

Web Tools for REDD monitoring and planning
Track: Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs
Authors: ERNESTO GIRON, Glenn Hyman

The International agreements to address climate change have sparked great interest in programs to reduce emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and other land-use changes. The development of these programs requires some technical expertise for analyzing land-use change and for assessing the economics of any program to reduce emissions. Expanding capacities to evaluate projects and programs can advance the overall effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We developed a tool for visualizing and querying results from MODIS imagery and phenological analysis to calculate measures of deforestation for user defined areas. An application was also developed to allow users to easily estimate the opportunity cost of avoided deforestation. These web applications were developed in ArcGIS Server Advanced using Spatial Extension, geoprocessing tools advantages for coding a big part of the workflow with python programming language, and we also used ArcGIS API for Flex integrated with Google Maps capabilities to build dynamic RIAs.