“Nowadays Russian forestry experiences intensive changes that had not occurred for more than 80 years. The changes concern different issues, including forest management, forest inventory, economic activities control,” explained Deputy General Director of Transparent World Dmitry Aksenov. A lot of traditional systems of data collection about forests are either destroyed, or not operating in full. Therefore, it became important to accumulate remote sensing data over the entire period of reforms, mostly starting early 2007 until present.
Project of forestry activity monitoring covered local forest divisions of Leningrad, Novgorod, Arkhangelsk, Kirov Regions, Republic of Karelia, Primorsky and Krasnodar Territories. Analysis of SPOT 2/4 (10 m resolution), IRS-P6 (5,6 m) and IRS-P5 images (2,5 m) enabled to detect logging sites, their boundaries, logways and main skid roads, as well as to detect a lot of forestry management infringements:
excesses in logging sites’ acreage, width and logging cycles violations;
violations of management in protection forests with restricted regimes (protected natural areas, forest reserves, etc);
loggings outside the allocated sites;
incompliance of logging methods and other parameters to those indicated in Forest Declaration.
Forestry activity monitoring using remote sensing data is carried out on behalf of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Roslesinforg”. Project results, as well as data obtained from the respective Roslesinforg branch offices about the legality of forestry-based activities, are available on «Monitoring of forestry activity» page of the Transparent World site.
“Modern problems of the forest sector (leasing relations evolution, certification, old-growth forests protection, illegal logging prevention, etc.) require the most updated and independent data to be resolved. In 2009, satellite-based monitoring of forests and forestry activity in Russia is still ongoing,” said ScanEx Vice-President Olga Gershenzon.
Usage of updated satellite information for forestry activity monitoring in Russia is possible due to the technology of ScanEx Center, which has the biggest in the country network of RS data reception ground stations, deployed in Moscow, Nizhnevartovsk, Irkutsk and Magadan. Besides, the archive of satellite imagery has been compiling since mid 90s of the last century and contains hundreds of terabytes of data of world leading RS programs.
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