DETAILED BASIC SKILLS
Over the past 10 years, RSET has successfully completed several projects involving different categories of activity, such as:
Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS)
RSeT possesses solid experience in remote sensing, GIS analysis, and the handling of operational forest monitoring platforms. Operational examples of this experience include the development of the Forest Reference Emission Level (FERL) for the National System of Protected Areas of Guinea-Bissau, submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in January 2019; support for the development of the National Forest Monitoring System of Guinea-Bissau; the creation of an open-source and easy-to-use crop suitability model 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 on the Google Earth Engine API (Lopes et al., 2018).
Forest inventory
Since its foundation, RSeT has participated in projects involving the collection and analysis of forest information, mainly for carbon accounting purposes, in the tropical forests of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The objective of all these forest inventories was to obtain emission factors for various forest strata, and for this purpose, the dendrometric characteristics of trees were measured in pre-selected plots. An example of this is the blue carbon REDD project in Guinea-Bissau, in which dendrometric data were collected for both terrestrial forests and mangroves in two protected areas of the country. The project was validated in 2015 by the VCS Standards and verified in 2019, becoming the first blue carbon REDD project to issue carbon credits (CBADP project).
Agroecological planning
In this sector, RSeT has focused on developing an operational tool for agroecological planning that can be easily used in developing countries. This tool allows for the assessment of the agricultural adaptability of various crops according to the basic parameters of each crop and current and future climatic conditions, considering various climate scenarios. A first version of the model was applied to a case study developed in three administrative regions of Guinea-Bissau. The main objective of this tool is to generate relevant regional information on climate vulnerability and food dependence, thus supporting effective agricultural planning.
Socioeconomic assessment
Forests and humans have always co-evolved, so understanding their relationship is essential for planning and implementing conservation and forestry projects, as well as for making public and private investments and evaluating the results of these actions. RSeT has extensive experience in developing and implementing participatory methods, which allows for an understanding of the territorial dynamics of target landscapes. In practice, all RSeT projects have involved these techniques, for example, semi-structured interviews with the community and participatory sessions with ministries for the Socioeconomic and 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, since its vision for achieving the sustainability of ecosystem services includes the ability of countries to respond locally and effectively to emerging environmental challenges. For this reason, RSeT has conducted a large number of lectures, workshops, remote consultations, study visits, among others, in the areas of Forest Inventory, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Monitoring and Communication (MVC), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Stakeholder engagement and policy guidance
RSeT has a solid track record in mapping and engaging stakeholders with international entities, regulators and funders, national entities, institutions and non-governmental organizations, regional entities and local actors within communities. RSeT has also conducted a number of community awareness initiatives and developed policy guidance documents for most projects.
