Forest Management and Conservation in an Information-Rich World

Summary Report from a SCOPE Workshop
15-18 December 2002
Held at Swope Conference Center, Marine Biological Laboratory
Woods Hole, MA

Background

The future of the Earth’s forests has sparked intense public debate for decades. The demand for forest products has grown dramatically, and is projected to continue to grow. Controversy over which forests to protect for conservation purposes, and how protected they should be, has engulfed important regions and international audiences. Tropical deforestation and its consequences for biodiversity loss and climate change continue to be an important social and scientific issue.

Forests, like all ecosystems, are now clearly understood to provide a multitude of ecosystem services as well as marketable goods. And most recently, the carbon in forested ecosystems has itself become a marketable, tradable commodity, as the wood itself has always been; providing new prospects for commercial benefits to arise from managing forested ecosystems.

The last decade has also seen an explosion of the development and use of new technologies for the transmission and use of information. The transformation of the Internet from a tool used only by scientists to communicate with each other to an engine of economic growth is nearly without parallel in recent decades. It is now routine within the scientific community and within many economic sectors to collaborate internationally through electronic mail, and to produce information dissemination tools using the World Wide Web. At the same time, new technologies are dramatically affecting the provision of environmental information. The development of remote sensing and geographic information systems from purely research exercises into more nearly operational domains seems also to have the potential to change how ecosystems are monitored and managed.

The Scientific Committee for Problems in the Environment (SCOPE) is beginning to explore the influence of new information technologies on a variety of environmental issues. This SCOPE project will synthesize the current information on these technologies as they have been applied in a series of case studies that have focused on the fate and management of forests. Its overall objective is to create a solid intellectual foundation for new applications of remote sensing, GIS, modeling and Internet technologies for forest conservation and management.

Report from the Workshop

The initial activity of this SCOPE project was to convene a workshop of organizations and scientists who have been active at the interface of new information technologies and forest conservation and management. The Steering Committee for the workshop put together an agenda and participant list. The workshop itself was held at the Marine Biological Laboratory’s Swope Conference Center, in Woods Hole, MA, USA, from 15-18 December 2002. The agenda follows this short description. Each item on the agenda has a link to the paper or power point presentation that was given during the workshop. These presentations provided the input for discussions by participants that is being captured as a synthesis paper.

The main output of the project will be a synthesis paper on the aspects of new information technologies as they relate to ecosystem management, and especially forest management. This paper will include

a snapshot of the current state of the art with respect to the use of existing and new remote sensing technologies for forest management and the links to both regional and global environmental issues;

a discussion of the current state of activities to coordinate the production and dissemination of remote sensing information in both government, private, and NGO communities;

a review of the policy and institutional issues with respect to data sharing, costs of data, and value-added products as they relate to improvements in forest management and both regional and global environmental issues; and.

an examination of future challenges in forest conservation and management and how these technologies can be used to minimize them.

As soon as feasible, the draft of the synthesis paper from the workshop will also be posted, along with an invitation for comment, before it is submitted for final publication.

For more information contact Anthony Janetos, Senior Fellow.