SilvaCarbon is an strategic program of US government that aim to increase technical capacity in countries that joint the reduce Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation  (REDD+) Initiative. The USFS’S International program and Forest Inventory and Analysis have shared experiences in Gabon on design and implementation of NFI.  From 2017 the USGS SilvaCarbon and NASA Goodard had provided various technical training in remote sensing, and these activities contributed to capacity building for AGEOS.

Futhermore, AGEOS now, as supporting agency for REDD+ in Gabon has as a main mandate to produce forest cover change estimates every two years as activity data for reporting. The guideline for generating activity data has been developed by AGEOS and will be conducted by applied medium spatial resolution, time series from LANDSAT, Sentinel 2, and Sentinel 1 images. 

Google Earth Engine  is  a  cloud  based  geospatial  remote  sensing  processing  platform,  that host an extensive public data catalog. It is  available  via  a  web-based  JavaScript  Application  Program Interface (API) called the Code Editor. The Google Earth  Engine  (GEE)  platform  is  where  users  can write  and  execute  scripts   to  share  and  repeat  geospatial  analysis   and  processing  workflows,   such  as land cover mapping. In this training session, participantes were introduced to and practice working in the  Earth  Engine  Code  Editor  platform,  explored  some  basic  programming  concepts,  and  learned  about  Earth Engine data structures and methods, functions, and algorithms.

Under the assistance of SilvaCarbon, in partnership with Google, a training for AGEOS, other institutions in Gabon, government officials of Cameroon and ROC took place the first week of July in the use of the GEE platform. This GEE training course was divided in to two  parts: 1) the first two  days training  on basic  GEE and 2) one day training on  using  GEE  for  forest cover mapping and monitoring  applications.  The course  was  structured  with  presentations  and  demonstrations  to  introduce technical material,  followed  by  hands  on exercises that participants complete individually or in small groups.

• Introduce participants to the Google Earth Engine, including the Code Editor;

• Explore basic JavaScript and Earth Engine programming concepts;

• Become familiar with geospatial Earth Engine Objects and their associated functions:  images and image collections, features and       feature collections, and geometries.

• To enhance capacity on the use of remote sensing data: pre-processing, anaysis, and mapping using GEE for Gabon, ROC and Cameroon participants