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The
CEPF Madagascar Vegetation Mapping Project is a
three year project (2003-2006), funded by the Critical
Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) and managed jointly
by The Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, Missouri
Botanical Garden, and Conservation
International’s
Center for Applied Biodiversity Science.
The project is innovative in a number of ways.
It employs state
of the art remote sensing technology and methodologies
to delimit Madagascar’s vegetation. It represents
an all-inclusive collaboration between specialists
from a wide range of botanical and conservation
institutions, which will result in the most thoroughly
ground truthed vegetation map ever compiled for
Madagascar. Finally, through a series of workshops,
it incorporates detailed consultations with the
conservation community to ensure that the final
products are of maximum relevance and utility to
conservation planners and managers.
An accurate and updated
vegetation map is imperative for conservation
planning and natural resource management in Madagascar.
It is also essential that the data on which such
a map is based be made freely available, so that
conservation organisations, Government departments,
academic institutions and other stakeholders can
use them as an up to date standard dataset on which
to base their activities. In order for a vegetation
map to fulfil its intended role it must:
- Accurately delimit areas
with various vegetation types as they currently
exist
- Assign those areas to
objective categories that can be easily recognized
in the field and
that reliably reflect fundamental biological
differences (primarily structural features, i.e.
physiognomy).
You can learn more about this project here.
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