Last week during a 4-day training workshop, the Haiti's Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR), the Ministry of the Environment (MoE), the National Center for Geo-Spatial Information (CNIGS), the Ministry of Planning and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), met within the framework of the "National Forest Inventory" project (currently in progress).

For several decades, Haiti's forests have suffered significant degradation due to human activities, notably charcoal production and agriculture, leading to an estimated loss of 82% of forest cover between 1988 and 2018. Faced with this situation, the Government, with the support of partners such as the FAO and the European Union, has initiated efforts for the restoration and sustainable management of forest resources, including the development of a methodological framework for a future forest policy.

In this context, the National Forest Inventory project aims to update cartographic data, produce the country's first forest inventory and strengthen the capacities of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) and the National Center for Geo-Spatial Information (CNIGS).

Workshop objectives :

• Establish a forest nomenclature;

• Prepare a land use and forest class map;

• Present the tools of Land cover meta-language (LCML), Collect Earth Online, SEPAL and QGIS; the System for accessing, processing and analyzing Earth observation data for terrestrial monitoring SEPAL and the Geographic Information System (QGIS);

• Familiarize Haitian technical experts with the underlying methodological approaches;

• Establish a detailed work program.

This workshop aimed to train national stakeholders in the tools and methods of the National Forest Monitoring System (SNSF), particularly in terms of access to data, classification of land use, collection of training and validation data, as well as processing of satellite images for cartography.

It will contribute to improving knowledge of forest resources, strengthening the coordination of stakeholders and supporting the development of a forest policy adapted to current challenges and will allow participants to learn how to access information related to land cover and land use and to use the tools and methods of the SNSF, in particular the classification of land cover, the collection of training and validation data, as well as the processing of satellite images for forest mapping.

The first step in constructing the methodology consists of adopting :

• A nomenclature for the land use system;

• An image processing and cartographic data production chain;

• A reference system for collecting training and validation data.

Expected results at the end of the workshop :

• Experts are familiar with Collect Earth Online, SEPAL and QGIS;

• A work plan for developing an LCML nomenclature is available;

• A work plan for mapping land use on a national scale is available.

HL/ HaitiLibre