Rapid assessment remote sensing of forest cover change to inform forest management: Case of the Monarch reserve

Abstract

Monitoring with the use of remote sensing is an instrumental component of natural resource management and conservation. Forests are an important global resource that impact a broad spectrum of terrestrial functions influencing global health. Land use change and other augmented risk factors (ex. disease vectors) reduce the resilience of the human population as well as ecosystem resilience and recovery. The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (MBBR), an important human-natural system, has a mixed history of success and failure in forest management. A rapid appraisal and monitoring tool is presented to compliment conservation efforts on the ground in the MBBR and to provide a baseline for monitoring, assessment and comparison. The results are sectioned into four parts, representing each of the four different agrarian nuclei (AN). Matrices and maps are provided for all four AN as resulted from the imaging analysis and mapping in ArcGIS for the period 2006 to 2015. The results showed that the reported trends of decreases in forest cover loss with increases in forest cover gains were supported. This approach provided a baseline for monitoring forest cover change over time to determine use-patterns and impacts of interventions. It is a potentially non-invasive method if field visits are not possible, since the forest cover assessment is completed with GIS. It is also a method that encourages collaboration and facilitation of outreach to open participation and dialogue with local managers as well as visual maps to encourage the acceptance of the information and interventions.