GIS & Mapping

Geographical Information Systems

The Geographic Information System Unit (GIS) at the National Forestry Authority has an obligation to carry out National Land Cover/Land Use Mapping on all land in Uganda.

The Geographical Information System documents the results in form of technical reports and land cover maps. Since the establishment of NFA two technical reports have been published including the Biomass Technical Report 2005 and the Biomass Technical Report 2009.

According to article 37 of the National Forestry and Tree Planting Act 2003, National Authority through Inventory has a mandate of producing the only comprehensive National land cover mapping of the total area in Uganda and the GIS is in the final stages of releasing the 2014 technical report.

The land cover/land use mapping exercise started in April 2013 and phase one of classification has been finalized and the result was presented in the Space Data Coordination Group Meeting (SDCG-5) organized by Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome on from 24 to 27th Feb 2014.

The participant countries included Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Ecuador and Panama. The same results are going to be synthesized into a report that will be submitted to FAO for the National Forest Resource Assessment (FRA-2015) reporting

The Land cover/Land use report contributes to many other reports but the major ones include but not limited to; the state of the Environment reports by NEMA, it also complements the statistics used by the Ministry of Finance in the budgeting process, and the statistical data is incorporated in various reports produced by UBOS.

The Ministry of Energy also uses the Biomass component of the report given the fact that 95% of population in Uganda depend on Biomass for energy hence there is need for sustained use of the fuel wood.

PROCESS OF LAND COVER MAPPING

  • A complete land cover/land use mapping exercise has to go through fourteen (14) steps. They include;
  • a.       Image procurement
  • b.       Cloud removal
  • c.       Subdividing images into tiles
  • d.       Image segmentation
  • e.       Calculation of segment statistics
  • f.        Generating training data
  • g.       Image classification
  • h.       Assigning class names
  • i.         Merging the tiles
  • j.         Compilation of statistics
  • k.       Verification/ground trothing
  • l.         Final edits/final compilation of statistics
  • m.     Map production
  • n.       Production and publication of the technical report.

 Biomass Study Reports

National Forestry is honoured to present this Biomass Technical Report which gives information on the land cover and biomass status of Uganda. We are indebted to the Norwegian government through NORAD for providing technical and financial assistance towards biomass monitoring inventories and land cover mapping exercises that have taken place in Uganda. In the absence of this assistance, the land cover maps and biomass inventories could not have been produced.

1) This report takes great effort to discuss the procedures involved in data capture, processing, analysis and presentation of facts on land cover and biomass within and outside CFR. While a land cover map was an output in itself, it was also an input in computation of national woody biomass.
Biomass Technical Report (Click to Download)
Biomass Technical report 2 (Click to Download)
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