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.