Four presentations from EOMonDis Consortium Members were accepted for oral presentation at the 36th ISRSE conference in Pretoria, S. Africa from 8-12 May 2017. Mr. F. Enssle from GAF AG presented the main objectives of the EOMonDis project and the overall technical design of a National Forest Monitoring Systems (NFMS) that incorporates radar and optical satellite; there was a special focus on the Earth Observation (EO) based products for the REDD+ and Zero Deforestation programmes. He noted that existing processing and analysing methods have to be improved especially for mapping tropical dry forest ecosystems. Tackling these challenges is currently the main objective of EOMonDis.

Dr. S. Mermoz from CESBIO presented the developments in the application of Sentinel-1 data for detecting forest change detection based on Sentinel-1 data. The method is based on analysing multi-temporal C-band radar data to detect differences at the boundary area of new deforestation events. He highlighted the need for combining radar and optical data to put operational forest monitoring system in place. Dr. S. Sannier from SIRS showed current progress in the EOMonDis project on near-real time forest monitoring in Gabon incorporating Senintel-2 and Landsat imagery. Dr. A. Bouvet from CESBIO further presented results from the EOMonDis project on the above-ground biomass mapping, which is based on ALOS-2 L-band radar data. He noted that especially for low biomass forests of up to 100t/ha and with its high spatial resolution of 20m, the product has major advantages compared to other global biomass maps.

The presentations were all well received and the Conference provided an important technical forum for the Consortium members to further discuss technical issues with the international scientific community, on the various challenges related to the method development in EoMonDis.