Clark Labs and Conservation International have recently signed a contract to partner in the application of REDD baselines as well as the co-design and development of REDD-specific functionality within the Land Change Modeler application in the IDRISI Taiga GIS and Image Processing system. Clark Labs and CI’s Science and Knowledge Division have shared a long-standing collaborative relationship in the testing, application and improvement of spatial modeling tools for REDD projects.
The first step in implementing a REDD project at the site or national level is to estimate the deforestation and/or degradation baseline, i.e., the expected future rate and distribution of change if a REDD project or policy is not employed. Conservation International has worked with the World Bank, CATIE and Clark Labs in the development of the first and second version of the baseline method for the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund, and it is currently under review by the Voluntary Carbon Standard Program for approved methods.
IDRISI Taiga currently allows for the calibration, validation and creation of maps of expected future deforestation trends, a fairly complex process. The purpose of this contract between Clark Labs and Conservation International is to design a REDD tool within the Land Change Modeler application of IDRISI to guide the user through the steps of baseline development and directly produce tables and graphics necessary for reporting. This new tool will greatly reduce the time and cost in the development of a deforestation baseline, which many regard as the most challenging technical hurdle in project development for many prospective REDD projects. The project will also include case studies, testing in different REDD scenarios and production of user guidelines. The tool will be co-designed by CI and Clark Labs. CI will provide all case study data for testing the tool.
It is hoped that the results of this collaboration will allow for wider adoption of REDD project development from the carbon and climate community by providing a more accessible approach to the complex technical challenges.
Clark Labs is based within the world-renowned Graduate School of Geography at Clark University and is the developer of the IDRISI Taiga GIS and Image Processing software and the Land Change Modeler software extension to ArcGIS.
