Madagascar Vegetation Mapping Project

The CEPF Madagascar Vegetation Mapping Project is a three year project (2003-2006), funded by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) and managed jointly by The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Conservation International’s Center for Applied Biodiversity Science.

"The project is innovative in a number of ways. It employs state of the art remote sensing technology and methodologies to delimit Madagascar’s vegetation. It represents an all-inclusive collaboration between specialists from a wide range of botanical and conservation institutions, which will result in the most thoroughly ground truthed vegetation map ever compiled for Madagascar. Finally, through a series of workshops, it incorporates detailed consultations with the conservation community to ensure that the final products are of maximum relevance and utility to conservation planners and managers.

" An accurate and updated vegetation map is imperative for conservation planning and natural resource management in Madagascar. It is also essential that the data on which such a map is based be made freely available, so that conservation organizations, Government departments, academic institutions and other stakeholders can use them as an up to date standard dataset on which to base their activities. In order for a vegetation map to fulfil its intended role it must:

• Accurately delimit areas with various vegetation types as they currently exist,
• Assign those areas to objective categories that can be easily recognized in the field and that reliably reflect fundamental biological differences (primarily structural features, i.e. physiognomy)."

Madagascar Vegetation Mapping Project