The Forest Management Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, in partnership with the United States Forest Service, is currently conducting the Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Regional Land Cover Monitoring System (RLCMS) Workshop on September 16-20, 2024 at Sotogrande Hotel, Quezon City.

The workshop is an introduction to the basics of GEE and hands-on training on using GEE for RLCMS and aims to establish basic understanding of GEE, insofar as the participants can use the tool for RLCMS and establish time-series algorithm scripts and/or graphical user interfaces.

In his opening remarks, Assistant Secretary for Field Operations – Mindanao and Director of the FMB in concurrent capacity, Arleigh J. Adorable, highlighted the support of the US Forest Service especially in the completion of the REDD+ Components. A few of the significant milestones from the cooperation are the development of the National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) and the submission of the first Forest Reference Emission Level (FREL) in January 2023.

To recall, the collaboration on various forestry-related areas between the USAID-US Forest Service and the Forest Management Bureau (FMB) goes back to 2014. The most recent initiative was the submission of the Philippines’ Forest Reference Emission Level (FREL) to UNFCCC. Through the support of USAID-USFS, the National FREL was published on the REDD+ web-based platform last 2023.

With the continued development of the Bureau’s capacity and the increasing availability of open-source land cover data development tools like Google Earth Engine (GEE), there is an expressed interest in further building FMB’s capacity to be able to develop the data in-house and produce Philippine-specific forest cover geospatial datasets from multiple years and develop protocols to analyze forest cover change over time.

The US Forest Service (USFS) and Spatial Informatics Group (SIG) will spearhead the conduct of the said activity. The workshop is attended by delegates from the Forest Management Bureau (FMB), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA), and Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA).