THAILAND FOREST COVER AND BIOMASS ESTIMATION MAPPING UNDER THE APFNET GREATER MEKONG SUB-REGION AND MALAYSIA PROJECT

摘要

The Great Mekong Sub-region (GMS) containing one of the world's largest tropical forests which play a vital role in sustainable development and provide a range of economic, social and environmental benefits, including essential ecosystem services such as climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, the forest in this Sub-region is experiencing deforestation rates at high level due to human activities. The reduction of the forest area has negative influence to the environmental and natural resources issues, in particularly, more and severe disasters have been occurred due to global warming, the release of the greenhouse gases. Therefore, in order to conduct forest management in the Sub-region efficiently, the Forest Cover and Carbon Mapping in Greater Mekong Sub-region and Malaysia project was initialized by the Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet) with the collaboration of various research institutions including Institute of Forest Resource Information Technique (IFRIT), Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF) and the countries in Sub region and Malaysia comprises of Cambodia, the People's Republic of China (Yunnan province and Guangxi province), Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Viet Nam. The main target of the project is to apply the intensive use of recent satellite remote sensing technology, establishing regional forest cover maps, documenting forest change processes and estimating carbon storage in the GMS and Malaysia. In this paper, the authors present the implementation of the project in Thailand as one of the participated countries in the project using satellite imagery, mainly from Landsat TM 5 and data products from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) instrument onboard of the NASA Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation (ICESat) satellite with field survey data in forest area over the country. First, the test sites for forest cover mapping were selected in Trad, Lampang and Ubon Rachathani provinces. Then the forest cover maps for 2010 and 2005 were generated according to the main target of the project. For above ground biomass mapping, the data collection were conducted as field plot measurement following the GLAS footprints, which will be applied to biomass estimation. The result of the project will be contributed as efficient tools to support decision makers to clearly understand the dynamic change of the forest cover which could benefit sustainable forest resources management in Thailand and the whole Sub-region.