The talk with present the key results of the IPCC Working Group III 5th assessment report. Concluding four years of intense scientific collaboration by hundreds of authors from around the world, the report responds to the request of the world's governments for a comprehensive, objective and policy neutral assessment of the current scientific knowledge on mitigating climate change. The report has been extensively reviewed by experts and governments to ensure quality and comprehensiveness.

Climate change 2014 - Mitigation of climate change

Dynamics of global forest area: Results from the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015

Addendum: The supplementary documents referenced in this manuscript are posted on the Web site https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/sampling/index.phpThe Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is in the process of moving from a system of quasiindependent, regional, periodic inventories to an enhanced program featuring greater national consistency, annual measurement of a proportion of plots in each State, new reporting requirements, and integration with the ground sampling component of the Forest Health Monitoring Program. This documentation presents an overview of the conceptual changes, explains the three phases of FIA's sampling design, describes the sampling frame and plot configuration, presents the estimators that form the basis of FIA's National Information Management System (NIMS), and shows how annual data are combined for analysis. It also references a number of Web-based supplementary documents that provide greater detail about some of the more obscure aspects of the sampling and estimation system, as well as examples of calculations for most of the common estimators produced by FIA.

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The enhanced forest inventory and analysis program - national sampling design and estimation procedures

The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations. Both the benefits of an expanding economy and the costs of reducing nature's benefits are unequally distributed. The fabric of life on which we all depend-nature and its contributions to people-is unravelling rapidly. Despite the severity of the threats and lack of enough progress in tackling them to date, opportunities exist to change future trajectories through transformative action. Such action must begin immediately, however, and address the root economic, social, and technological causes of nature's deterioration.

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Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change

Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 "World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity" (see supplemental file S1). These concerned professionals called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and cautioned that "a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided." In their manifesto, they showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world. They expressed concern about current, impending, or potential damage on planet Earth involving ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine life depletion, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. They proclaimed that fundamental changes were urgently needed to avoid the consequences our present course would bring.

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World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA Forest Service has initiated a transition from regional, periodic inventories to an enhanced national FIA program featuring annual measurement of a proportion of plots in each state, greater national consistency, and integration with the ground sampling component of the Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) program. The transition has required conceptual and technical changes in the statistical methodology that supports the program. This article provides a brief historical perspective on the FIA program, announces publication of the statistical documentation supporting the program, previews individual chapters in the documentation, and provides a brief discussion of areas where investigations are continuing.

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The enhanced forest inventory and analysis program of the USDA forest service : Historical perspective and announcement of statistical documentation

Addendum: The supplementary documents referenced in this manuscript are posted on the Web site https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/sampling/index.phpThis chapter outlines prescribed core procedures for deriving population estimates from attributes measured in conjunction with the Phase 1 and Phase 2 samples. These estimation procedures also apply to those Phase 3 attributes in common with Phase 2. Given the sampling frame and plot design described in the previous two chapters, many estimation approaches can be applied. In fact, one goal of the overall design is to maximize flexibility, so Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data can be used to address a variety of analytical needs.

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Sample-based estimators used by the forest inventory and analysis national information management system

In cooperation with the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station, an algorithm has been developed to replace the current aerial-photography-derived FIA Phase I estimates of forest/ non-forest area with a Landsat TM-based forest area estimation. Corrected area estimates were obtained using a new hybrid classifier called Iterative Guided Spectral Class Rejection (IGSCR) for portions of three physiographic regions of Virginia. Corrected area estimates were also derived using the Landsat TM-based Multi-Resolution Land Characteristic Inter-agency Consortium (MRLC) cover maps. Both satellite-based corrected area estimates were tested against the traditional photo-based estimates. Forest area estimates were not significantly different (at the 95 percent level) between the traditional FIA, IGSCR, and MRLC methods, although the precision of the satellite-based estimates was lower. Map accuracies were not significantly different (at the 95 percent level) between the IGSCR method and the MRLC method. Overall accuracies ranged from 80 percent to 89 percent using FIA definitions of forest and non-forest land use. Given standardization of the image rectification process and training data properties, the IGSCR methodology is fast, objective, and repeatable across users, regions, and time, and it outperforms the MRLC for FIA applications.

Landsat TM-Based Forest Area Estimation Using Iterative Guided Spectral Class Rejection

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Gregory A. Reams

Papers

Dynamics of global forest area: Results from the FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015

The enhanced forest inventory and analysis program of the USDA forest service : Historical perspective and announcement of statistical documentation

Sample-based estimators used by the forest inventory and analysis national information management system

Landsat TM-Based Forest Area Estimation Using Iterative Guided Spectral Class Rejection

Analytical alternatives for an annual inventory system