Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (EFForTS)

Background and Objective

Over the last decades, the lowlands of Jambi province in Sumatra (Indonesia) have undergone a major transformation from forests towards a cash crop-dominated landscape of rubber and oil palm plantations. EFForTS is a Collaborative Research Centre 990 funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) that investigates the ecological and socio-economic effects of such transformation based on research carried out in the Bukit Duabelas and Hutan Harapan area in Jambi province focusing on smallholder systems.

Approach

In the EFForTS project, more than 160 researchers from the University of Göttingen, University of Hohenheim, Thünen-Institute and Leibniz Association in Germany and the Indonesian universities IPB University (Bogor), UNTAD (Tadulako University, Palu) and UNJA (University of Jambi) work in close cooperation, representing a wide range of disciplines including ecology, forestry, agriculture, remote sensing, economics, human geography, and cultural anthropology.

Within this context, remote sensing supports the following tasks:

• documentation of land use and land cover change in the province of Jambi, Sumatra

• assessment of structural parameters in forests and plantations using metrics that are derived based on high resolution point clouds from an airborne laser scanning campaign

• scaling-up of state and pressure indicators in forest and plantation ecosystems from the plot to the landscape level based on all available remote sensing data

Results

As part of the tasks, a series of spatially-explicit information layers were generated for the project on the status and condition of land use and stock structure in the study area. For this purpose, new methods of data processing and evaluation were developed and scientifically published (see publications).

The list of products derived from remote sensing data includes in detail:

• a collection of 22 metrics of vegetation structure created from LIDAR aerial survey data for parts of the study area (see Camaretta et al. 2021)
• a land cover classification based on the LIDAR metrics for the reference year 2020 (see Camaretta et al. 2021)
• Maps of vegetation height (canopy height) for the entire study area (Jambi province) based on a fusion of point-based satellite LIDAR images (GEDI) and interferometric radar data from the TanDEM-X mission available over the entire study area (Schlund et al. 2023)
• Maps of aboveground biomass and its change (2012/2019) based on digital elevation models from the TanDEM-X mission that were corrected for SAR signal penetration (Schlund et al. 2021)

The available data and products serve the project partners as a basis for upscaling the results from the field surveys and investigations from the plot level to the landscape level.  

Links and Downloads

official webpage at University of Göttingen: www.uni-goettingen.de/en/310995.html