The European Community TREES project is carried out by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of Ipra, Italy. The first phase of the project was initiated in 1991, and the objective was to develop space based techniques for the monitoring of tropical forests. TREES is now in its second phase (1997), and its objective is to develop a prototype of an operational system of land cover monitoring that will primarily focus on the tropical forest canopy. Five specific modules have been defined: 

• Data and Information: securing access and acquisition of a pan-tropical database

• Analysis: to carry out the data analysis that will lead to the detection and measurement of tropical forest cover changes

• Research: on methods of remote sensing data analysis, application of new instruments, modeling spatio-temporal patterns of forest canopy changes, ...

• Tropical Forest Information System: to develop a large GIS that will  become a source of data and information available to users

• Users Interface: to communicate with the users community

Fig. 10  
The TREES project has already established a close relationship with the FAO-FRA project and the NASA Landsat PATHFINDER project regarding the exchange of information and data. 

In particular for Central Africa, the TREES project has produced a coarse resolution map of forest cover at a 1:5 million scale, based on the interpretation of AVHRR images (1 km resolution). Another data set produced was the mosaic of 477 ERS-1 SAR images over the Zaire Basin. In the same context, TREES is collaborating with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA to develop a similar data set with JERS data, in the near future. 

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