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[Celio De Sousa] Liberia is an incredibly biodiverse country.
The ecosystems, like its forest and mangroves, have an impact on the country's economic plans,
and as a result, people's livelihoods and the environment.
I'm part of NASA's technical team under the partnership with Conservation International.
NASA's role here is actually to provide the expertise and the technical experience in
remote sensing and earth observation that it has as an institution.
So, part of my job is actually to leverage all of this knowledge
and experience and data sets and different technologies that we have available
through NASA to provide these nations with up-to-date, accurate, high-resolution land cover maps.
This is important because the first step of ecosystem accounting is to actually map the
dynamics of ecosystems over time and we also must verify and compile biodiversity information with
these land cover maps to get a complete picture of ecosystems and their benefits.
[Trond Larsen] Conservation International is working closely in this partnership with NASA to ultimately
develop this first ever ecosystem map for Liberia.
There's really two work streams that are coming together, and NASA has been leading the development of a land cover map,
and CI has been leading the development of a map of
potential ecosystem types, because this really didn't yet exist for Liberia.
When we're talking about these benefits, we're referring to natural capital, which is really
the stocks of these natural resources, and that's
estimated to be even more than half of the total wealth in countries such as Liberia.
So there's really a desperate need for a more cost-effective and replicable approach to assess
what this wealth is coming from natural ecosystems,
and the first step to do that is to combine
where we expect these potential ecosystems to occur with the actual known land cover that NASA has produced
to come up with that final map of ecosystem extent. Because it's those differences
in ecosystem types that are providing those different benefits and
we need to know where those are spatially so that we can begin to understand how
much and from where those benefits are coming, so that we can then make decisions
about how to protect them and maintain those flows of benefits into the future.
[Celio De Sousa] We are producing and offering these countries the tools that they need to actually start accounting
for their ecosystems and their ecosystem services,
and bringing this information into their decision-making at a national level.
So this will ultimately translate into better policies for conservation, and
that will bring essentially benefits for their economy and the society in general.
[Trond Larsen] So if we can regularly update these accounts over time, then we can
really understand those trends in how nature is contributing to the economy and to human
well-being, and we can use that information to make
better decisions about how we can protect those ecosystems and maintain
the flows of those benefits that people need.
[Celio De Sousa] The government of Liberia formally adopted this map as the basis
for the national system of ecosystem accounting. So, it is a huge deal for us,
because this map will essentially serve as the starting point for them,
not only for ecosystem accounting, but for other conservation and planning efforts as well.
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