This week's user story is about a research titled “More than one-quarter of Africa's tree cover found outside areas previously classified as forest”, focusing on mapping the tree cover of continental Africa.  It is addressed that the current monitoring systems tend to neglect the trees outside of forests, and/or consistent monitoring can be over-costly. Therefore, by developing a method to reach accurate results in analyzing tree cover in Africa, they aim to help reconsider the effects of land use and construct a new ground for climate change solutions and tree-related studies. 

To conduct their research, they benefited from 3-m resolution satellite imagery provided by PlanetScope through the NICFI Satellite Data Program. They mapped tree cover of forest and non-forest areas in continental Africa. One of the remarkable results they got is that 29% of tree cover found outside areas (like croplands and grassland) had been identified as tree cover before.  

In the article, they emphasized the importance of accessibility of NICFI Data:  

"...Given that PlanetScope imagery is available every day for the whole world, these processing methods lay the groundwork for global tree cover mapping at an annual scale and very high spatial resolution. Additionally, the free availability of NICFI PlanetScope data for the tropics makes this methodology feasible for developing countries at the national level…."  (Reiner et al, 2022). 

Click to read about their research and learn more about their results.