Nationwide Natural Resource Inventory of the Philippines Using Lidar: Strategies, Progress, and Challenges

Abstract

Commission VI, WG VI/6 KEY WORDS: LiDAR, natural resources, agricultural, forest, coastal, hydrological, renewable energy ABSTRACT:The Philippines has embarked on a detailed nationwide natural resource inventory using LiDAR through the Phil-LiDAR 2 Program. This 3-year program has developed and has been implementing mapping methodologies and protocols to produce high-resolution maps of agricultural, forest, coastal marine, hydrological features, and renewable energy resources. The Program has adopted strategies on system and process development, capacity building and enhancement, and expanding the network of collaborations. These strategies include training programs (on point cloud and image processing, GIS, and field surveys), workshops, forums, and colloquiums (program-wide, cluster-based, and project-based), and collaboration with partner national government agencies and other organizations. In place is a cycle of training, implementation, and feedback in order to continually improve the system and processes. To date, the Program has achieved progress in the development of workflows and in rolling out products such as resource maps and GIS data layers, which are indispensable in planning and decision-making. Challenges remains in speeding up output production (including quality checks) and in ensuring sustainability considering the short duration of the program. Enhancements in the workflows and protocols have been incorporated to address data quality and data availability issues. More trainings have been conducted for project staff hired to address human resource gaps. Collaborative arrangements with more partners are being established. To attain sustainability, the Program is developing and instituting a system of training, data updating and sharing, information utilization, and feedback. This requires collaboration and cooperation of the government agencies, LGUs, universities, other organizations, and the communities.

Quality Assessment and Control of Outputs of a Nationwide Agricultural Land Cover Mapping Program Using Lidar: Phil-Lidar 2 Parmap Experience

“…Two of the project's specific objectives are to develop algorithms and workflows for extracting and characterizing agricultural features (various crops, trees, etc.) from LiDAR data and other remotely-sensed data, and field measurements and to produce detailed maps of agricultural resources as well as those facilities related to agriculture Blanco et al, 2016;Pagkalinawan et al, 2017). Production of agricultural land cover maps is divided into four (4) processes namely land cover classification, GIS post-processing, schema application and map lay-out.…”

“…The Program is a collaboration between fifteen (15) SUC/HEIs led by UPD. UPD is primarily assigned to spearhead the development of workflows and algorithms and capacitate partner SUC/HEIs through knowledge sharing in order to implement resource mapping in their assigned area (Blanco, Tamondong, Perez, Ang, & Paringit, 2015;Blanco et al, 2016;Pagkalinawan et al, 2017).…”