SFMIS - A Landcover Mapping Tool to Inform on Sustainable Development Goal 15.2.1

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15.2.1 progress towards sustainable forest management, consists of tracking net forest area change on an annual basis. Panama is a participatory country to this SDG and has been reporting statistics on forest cover based on remote sensing data, however, throughout the years they have used different satellite platforms and methodologies. In addition, certain areas have prevalent cloud cover, which can account for missing data from optical images for approximately 5% of the country. The objective of this effort is to create an open source landcover mapping tool (Sustainable Forest Management Information System SFMIS) to generate consistent year-to-year landcover maps and statistics on landcover change trends that can be used to inform on SDG 15.2.1 SFMIS uses a decision tree based supervised classification approach to generate landcover maps of Panama using a combination of satellite data from optical sensors (Landsat-8, Sentinel-2) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors (Sentinel-1 and PALSAR). The tool allows for year to year comparisons of landcover change and calculations of net forest change trends. In addition, the tool allows for climatological analysis based on air temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture to identify anomalies and how these might be driving changes in forest cover. SFMIS has features that make it customizable to the users needs such as spatial and temporal selection, visualizations, graphic generation, and data download options. This presentation will demonstrate development and validation of SFMIS. Portions of this work were carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.