The Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR/ CEFIPRA) has just granted funding over a three year period of a project entitled "Controlling for upscaling uncertainty in assessment of forest aboveground biomass in the Western Ghats of India".

This project is jointly led by the UMR AMAP, Montpellier and the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun, in collaboration with the Department of Ecology and the Laboratory of Applied Informatics and Geomatics of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP).

The objective of this project is to assess uncertainty in the evaluation of forest aboveground biomass at critical steps of the upscaling process from local forest data to regional extrapolations, in order to improve large-scale biomass and carbon stock assessments. It focuses on the humid forests of the Western Ghats of India, for which field data, satellite images and detailed vegetation maps are available. This project is an accompanying research of the National Carbon Project (NCP) leaded by the Indian Principal Collaborator. It is also part of a research programme of the French Principal Collaborator, which searches for a pertinent integration of the allometric theory of plants with 3D simulations of forest stand dynamics and canopy texture analysis in order to predict properties of forest stands at multiple spatial scales. The project has great potential applications within the framework of NCP and more generally within the UN-REDD programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This project, led jointly by Dr. Pierre Couteron (UMR AMAP) and Dr. V. K. Dadhwal (IIRS), should begin by mid-2011.

Contact : Dr. Cédric Véga