ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some perspectives on future earth observation technology for monitoring forests at the global scale. Monitoring forest areas over anything greater than local or regional scales would be a major challenge without the use of satellite imagery, in particular for large and remote regions. Satellite remote sensing combined with a set of ground measurements for verification plays a key role in determining rates of forest cover loss and gain. The use of medium spatial resolution satellite imagery for historical assessment of deforestation has been boosted by changes to the policy determining access and distribution of data from the US Landsat archive. Mature forest monitoring methods need to be ported to operational settings. Monitoring systems such as Brazil’s PRODES deforestation mapping program need to be replicated in other countries where results can be directly incorporated into policy and governance settings.
