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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Protection in the Tropics: Reference Levels and MRV – Remote Sensing, In-Situ or Both?July 8 Tuesday

About Our Speaker


Jeremy Freund

Jeremy T. Freund has over 20 years’ experience in the fields of satellite remote sensing, GIS and applied geography. He has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Masters in Physical Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. During his tenure at UCSB, he developed a crop monitoring/ famine early warning system for Kenya. Jeremy has subsequently worked in natural resource management, with an emphasis on wildlife and biodiversity conservation and applied forestry / biometric applications. In his current role as VP Carbon Development at Wildlife Works, Jeremy’s primary responsibilities involve carbon accounting for REDD+ Projects, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems design & management as well as validation & verification (audit) management for avoided deforestation programs. Jeremy has authored Project Descriptions (PDs) for Wildlife Works’ three successful VCS/CCB accredited REDD+ projects, including the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Projects and the Lac Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project in the DRC. He is also currently managing the calculation of the Reference Emission Level (REL) and national MRV system design for the Mai Ndombe Jurisdictional/Nested ER Program, the very first of its kind.

About the Talk

Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), while not a new concept in contemporary forestry, has necessitated new forays into previously unexplored locales. Studied for the purposes of REDD+ carbon accounting, the “impenetrable forests,” endemic to moist tropical ecosystems have presented a host of new challenges and lessons that could not have possibly been predicted or understood with general forest theory or remote sensing observation. In this talk, Jeremy will review some of these said challenges and lessons learned that could only have been discovered in the field, through real, boots-on-the-ground MRV efforts. He will explore the solutions to these challenges that were implemented through necessity. As direct benefit to time spent in the field, Wildlife Works Carbon (WWC) is now able to better understand how to accurately measure the gorgeous, yet often treacherous and unforgiving forests of our world’s humid equatorial regimes. Armed with such practical knowledge gained deep within the forest, WWC has begun to assemble a database of field protocols and standard procedures - an arsenal if you will - of solutions, work-arounds and means to facilitate the monitoring of and reporting on our planet’s beautiful and vital forest estates.

Slides

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Recording

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This talk was held at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on July 8, 2014, as part of the Carbon Monitoring System Applications Policy Speaker Series.

For upcoming events, check out CMS Applications Policy Speaker Series.

Your suggestions for future speakers or feedback about our series are welcomed. 
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