CNRD scholarship holder successfully defended his PhD thesis

We are happy to announce that CNRD stipendiary Dr. Arun Kumar Pratihast received his PhD degree on the 12th of October, 2015, in line with his public defense at Wageningen University, Netherlands. Next to the supervisor Prof. Dr. M. Herold (Wageningen University), Prof. Dr. Lars Ribbe, ITT Executive Director and CNRD coordinator, co-supervised his thesis “Interactive community-based tropical forest monitoring using emerging technologies”. Dr. Pratihast made a highly important contribution to the investigation of community-based data and forest degradation monitoring. The main goal of the thesis was to develop an approach that combines emerging technologies and community-based observations for tropical forest monitoring. The overall conclusion is that emerging technologies, such as smartphones, Web-GIS and social media, incorporated with user friendly interface improve the interactive participation of local communities in forest monitoring and decrease errors in data collection. The results show that community-based monitoring can provide data on forest carbon stocks, forest area changes as well as data that help to understand local drivers of emissions. The thesis also shows, in theory and in practice, how local data can be used to link with medium and high resolution remote sensing satellite images for an operational near real-time forest monitoring system at a local scale.

Dr. Aruns results have been of major use for the LUCCi project. One of his case studies was located in Vietnam, the other one in Ethiopia.

PhD defense Dr Pratihast