Understanding forest carbon and biodiversity on the ground at the landscape scale

This pillar supports a limited number of long-term research-oriented forest sites to focus research on the biodiversity, ecology and carbon cycle of tropical forests. These 'super sites' are essential for the calibration and validation of all types of remote sensing methods used within Pillar 3. They include inventory plots as well as landscape-scale airborne or ground-based LIDAR systems for carbon estimation. Pillar 1 also supports the measurement of larger scientific inventory networks, including data from commercial leases, to integrate super sites into larger regions and validate remote sensing products. On the super sites, indirect and non-invasive methods such as camera traps, passive sound recorders and drones will be deployed and analysed by artificial intelligence to assess the state of animal biodiversity (emblematic and endangered species and ordinary biodiversity) in relation to plant biodiversity and the structure and functioning of the forest habitat. The relevant results, which establish a link between the environmental integrity of the tropical forest and biodiversity indices, will be integrated into a monitoring system that has been developed. In addition, forest and wildlife conservation and restoration practices, the cultural attitudes of local communities and indigenous peoples, and sustainable management practices on the periphery of the forest basin will be studied and collated.

Another aim of the One Forest Vision initiative is to facilitate the identification of tropical plants, a necessary objective for the delimitation and preservation of priority areas for conservation in tropical forest basins. Thus, Pillar 1 will enhance the Pl@ntNet platform, the most widely used plant biodiversity observatory in the world today, to overcome the taxonomic barrier (the difficulty of identifying plants) using machine learning and the recognition of plant species from photos. In parallel with the process of integrating existing iconographic databases, the platform is and will be regularly updated by volunteer contributors and used to raise awareness among the entire community interested in tropical plants. Its gradual adaptation to the still little-known flora of tropical regions and the promotion of its various functionalities, which can be used in a number of areas, will make it easier to mobilise the public through this participative and practical approach to botany. In addition, the collection of new field data in the countries of the Congo Basin, and particularly in the super sites, will contribute to better mapping of the forests and the carbon emissions resulting from their transformation.

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