The Central Africa Regional Project for the Environment

Principal Investigators:

Chris Justice, Didier Devers, Deirdre Smith, Diane Davies, Matt Hansen (SDSU), Minnie Wong, Alice Altstatt, Dan Slayback (SSAI), Compton Tucker (GSFC)

The Department of Geography in partnership with researchers from NASA Goddard has been involved with research in the Congo Basin since 1985 and has been a partner in the USAID CARPE program since its formulation in 1992 (http://carpe.umd.edu). The program is a broad based research initiative of non-government organizations, universities and government researchers to reduce tropical deforestation and increase biodiversity protection in the Congo Basin. The research addresses a wide range of activities associated with development and maintenance of national parks and protected areas, reduced impact logging, bush meat, wildlife conservation, and community-based forest management.

The UMD/NASA component has been largely focused on determining the location rates of deforestation, monitoring protected areas for agricultural encroachment and logging and modeling future land use change in the region. Remotely sensed data collected by the NASA Landsat Pathfinder Project have been used to monitor deforestation since the early 1970’s. Higher resolution data (1m-3m resolution) have been used to examine forest degradation associated with logging activities. These satellite data have been used to establish trends in land cover change.

The current round of research activities at UMD include coordinating the various remote sensing projects within CARPE, developing new multi-scale monitoring capabilities incorporating data from the MODIS instrument, developing indicators of forest change, contributing to periodic assessments of the state of the forest, monitoring selected landscapes, increasing technology transfer, and the training of professionals in the use of geospatial data.

Collaborating partners include World Conservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, World Resources Institute, and the US Forest Service, among others. For more information contact Chris Justice at cjustice@umd.edu.