In 10 years, RSeT has successfully completed several projects involving different categories of activity, such as:

 

Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) | RSeT has a solid background in remote sensing, GIS analysis, and manipulation of operational forest monitoring platforms. Operational examples of this expertise include the development of the Forest Reference Emission Level (FREL) for the National System of Protected Areas of Guinea-Bissau, submitted to UNFCCC in January 2019; support for the development of Guinea-Bissau’s National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS); the creation of a user-friendly, open-source model of crop suitability for agricultural planning in Guinea Bissau (Le Page et al., 2019); and the production of a land use and land cover map in Mozambique with a large amount of data using cloud computing in Google Earth Engine API (Lopes et al., 2018).

 

Forest Inventory | Since the beginning of its foundation, RSeT has been taking part in projects that involve the collection and analysis of forest information, mostly for carbon accounting purposes, in the tropical forests of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe. The purpose of all these forest inventories was to obtain emission factors for several forest strata and, to achieve this, tree’s dendometric characteristics were measured in pre-selected plots. An example of that is the blue carbon REDD project in Guinea-Bissau, in which dendometric data was collected for both terrestrial forest and mangroves within two protected areas of the country. The project was validated in 2015 by the VCS Standards and verified in 2019, making it the first blue carbon REDD project to issue carbon credits (CBADP project).

 

Agroecological planning | In this sector, RSeT has focused on the development of an agroecological zoning operational tool that can be easily used in developing countries. This tool allows to evaluate the agricultural suitability of several crops according to the base parameters of each crop and the current and future climatic conditions considering various climatic scenarios. A first version of the model was applied to a case study developed in three administrative regions in Guinea-Bissau. The main objective of this tool is to generate relevant information at the regional level on climate vulnerability and food dependency and thus to support agricultural planning effectively.

 

Socioeconomic Assessment | Forests and human beings have always co-evolved, thus understanding their relationship is essential for the planning and implementation of conservation and forestry projects, as well as to carry out public and private investments and to assess the results of these actions. RSeT has extensive experience in participatory methods design and implementation, which allows to understand the territorial dynamics of the target landscapes. Practically all of RSeT’s projects involved these techniques, for example, semi-structured community interviews and participatory sessions with ministries for the Socio-Economic-Environmental Assessment of the Dulombi-Boe-Tchetche complex in Guinea-Bissau.

 

Capacity Building | In most of its projects and activities, RSeT includes a capacity building component, as its vision for achieving sustainability of ecosystem services includes countries’ capability to respond locally and effectively to the arising environmental challenges. For this reason, RSeT has conducted a large number of lectures, workshops, remote consultations, study visits, among others, in the fields of Forest Inventory, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Reporting and Verification (MRV), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

 

Stakeholder Engagement and policy-guidance | RSeT has a solid experience in stakeholder mapping and engagement with international entities, regulators and financiers, national entities, institutions and non-governmental organizations, regional entities, and local agents with the communities. RSeT has also carried out a series of awareness raising initiatives with communities and redacted policy-guidance documents in most projects.