 All right, so let's get started. Hello, everyone. Welcome from Rome. We are so pleased that you can join us today from around the world for this webinar on CPLAN, a new forest research and planning tool available through the FAO's cloud computing platform CPLAN. This year 2021 marks the kickoff of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and we just saw the official launch of the UN Decade two weeks ago. I believe many of you joining us today have been involved in and contributed to the UN Decade launch in some way through local to global level actions. The global restoration commitments and pledges have now reached almost 1 billion hectares and since this decade there has been ever-growing momentum to promote actions on the ground. However, our stakes are high and resources are limited. Today we are so pleased to be showing and fully launching the CPLAN tool which aims to aid decision makers in identifying promising cost-effective restoration locations while identifying potential trade-offs among impacts. I mentioned the full launch. Actually, we had a soft launch that pooled in a session during the Global Landscape Forum Africa event on the 3rd of June in the lead-up to the official decade launch. So today is a follow-up webinar and we are very thrilled to be able to present and share with you more details of the tool functionalities. My name is Yoshihigawa from FAO Forestry Division and I have the honor of moderating today's webinar and of course I'm joined by great speakers and colleagues who are supporting us through this Zoom platform. So we encourage you to introduce yourself in the chat box and pose your questions in the Q&A box during the presentations. I'd also like to remind the participant that this webinar is being recorded. We will be able to share with you the recording and the presentation materials after the webinar. So no worries, you don't need to ask about it. Now to get us started, I have the pleasure to introduce Julie and Fox, who is the FAO team leader of the National Forestry Monitoring Team and also serves as the coordinator of Task Force and Monitoring in support of the decade. Julian will help us to set the scene and provide us with some opening remarks. Over to you, Julian. Thanks so much, Yoshihiko. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world. Thank you so much for joining us today. It is webinar season, so we really appreciate you taking the time to join us. And so what did we just witness? We witnessed the official launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration two weeks ago. And what a launch it was. The World Environment Day website was viewed 140 million times. Many people are saying it was the most successful World Environment Day in the history of the UN Day. And to many, it represented a turning point for the restoration movement. The moment it became a movement. So this is the perfect moment to launch a tool in support to the decade. We're really pleased to continue to build the momentum to be sharing and fully launching the C plan tool in support to the decade today that's focused on integrating socioeconomic and biophysical data in forest restoration planning. It's really a joint effort between FAO, SIGGIS, silver carbon, NASA, and researchers at Peking University and Duke University, and the 10 countries that have been piloting the tool, including Vietnam, who has joined us today. Thanks so much for joining us today. We're working closely on piloting the tool and really thanks again to collaborators, countries, and especially I'd like to acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries of the Government of Japan. So the UN Decade aims to prevent, halt, and reverse the degradation of our planet's ecosystems, which, as we know, are integral in supporting all life on earth and leaving us with a healthier planet and healthier people. To meet this vision and to support the ambitious targets set by countries and private organizations, we must know where to restore, how to restore, and be able to monitor and measure what is working and undertake adaptive management when things are not working as we had hoped. These are critical to scaling up successful solutions and ensuring efficiency in our investments in the land sector. We also know that sound science-based restoration monitoring can help us to continue to raise restoration ambitions, maintain and strengthen political support, and ultimately get to where we want to be in 10 years. So the monitoring task force was established in support to the UN Decade and Ecosystem Restoration and FAO had the pleasure of being asked to lead the task force. It brings together over 280 experts from over 100 organizations and really we thank you so much for your contributions and for sharing our collective vision, which is that a science-based restoration movement should be informed by the best available technology and data for planning and monitoring restoration actions on the ground. This can help turn commitments into actions and can help scale investments in restoration. The task force has developed the framework for ecosystem restoration monitoring we call the Firm to improve data access transparency and to ensure actions to meet ambitious restoration commitments are guided by the best available science. We have launched the minimum viable product firm Geospatial Platform two weeks ago at GLF Africa and the platform is now available and accessible to all restoration stakeholders and I'm sure somebody will put a link in the chat. So the firm has many functionalities. It provides a link to several tools and platforms. It will continue to evolve and leads to evolve through the decade and it also provides linkage to this to the C-Plan tool which we are presenting and launching today which will further be integrated so it can be fully interoperable with the firm in the coming months. So in conclusion the C-Plan tool is currently being piloted in 10 countries and similar to the firm platform C-Plan will keep evolving with input from you the restoration stakeholders. Today we launched the first version. We hope you will join the effort in further developing the tool. It is a collaborative effort. Thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it and we really appreciate your willingness to engage. We invite you to engage, ask questions and look forward to the discussion. Back to you Yoshihiko. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Jurian for those opening words and for highlighting the people of the world planning and monitoring in further scaling the restoration and also the importance of social economic information to help attract further investment including from the private sector. And further it's very exciting to know how the C-Plan will C-Plan will be incorporated to the firm the umbrella platform for the monitoring and reporting of the UN Decade. So now to kick us off I wanted to hand over the floor to the first two speakers Jeffrey Vincent and Yuan Yuan Yi to present the overview of the C-Plan. Jeff is a professor of forest economics and management at Duke University and Yuan Yuan is a research scientist at the National School of Development at Peking University. Both have worked very closely over the past two years to develop several socio-economic data layers for the tool and providing theoretical background. Jeff and Yuan Yuan I turn the floor to you both. Thank you Yoshihiko. It's a pleasure to provide an overview of C-Plan to you. Over the past year I've had the pleasure of developing this tool with a highly skilled team from FAO, the Spatial Informatics Group, Silver Carbon, Peking University and my own organization Duke University in the United States. Although this presentation bears the names of just me and Yuan Yuan Yi, many others did contribute to the work that we'll present. C-Plan is a spatially explicit forest restoration planning tool. This means that it provides information on particular locations that are available for restoration and information on what the cost, benefits and risks might be associated with restoring those particular sites. It is a planning tool, not a monitoring tool. Monitoring is of course extremely important as Julian has emphasized but the purpose of this tool is to assist restoration stakeholders in the public, private and non-profit sectors with identifying the locations that are most suitable for restoration which stakeholders then can then investigate more carefully using information that's more detailed than is found in this tool. I want to emphasize this tool is intended to support planning decisions, not to make those decisions. It's part of the open source toolkit that FAO has created in open forest SEPL and it's Google Earth Engine based. The tool does emphasize socioeconomic factors, benefits, costs and risks and the reason for this emphasis is simple. If history is any guide then the bulk of forest restoration is going to occur on marginal agricultural lands. These are lands that are currently being used by someone to grow crops or graves livestock and the users are more likely to invest in growing trees on that land if they expect restoration to provide benefits that will outweigh the costs. Now to date most research on forest restoration has emphasized biophysical aspects of restoration such as where the locations on the planet surface where conditions are right for growing trees. Now this is essential research, the tool draws on it but this biophysical research on its own is not sufficient for measuring the suitability of restoration. Consideration of economics is particularly important in the current moment. Restoration is costly both in terms of the opportunity cost of not using land for other purposes but also for the direct investment that may need to be made to plant trees or to take other actions to encourage regeneration of sites. In a fact sheet that came out about a year ago UNEP and FAO estimated the cost of restoring 350 million hectares of land at $1 trillion total. This estimate is kind of incongruously placed over a shot of a coral reef. Also important for restoration but not our focus here today. Now a trillion dollars is a lot and the need for this investment is coming at a time when government budgets are stressed. This is a chart from a recent UN department of economic and social affairs report which shows that on average governments in low and middle income countries had deficits even before the pandemic but deficits have worsened over the last year as a result of the pandemic and so this is a time when funding from traditional government sources is scarce. It's a time when not much ODA official development assistance flows to forestry. The left bar here is the annual estimate of needed funding for forest restoration about $100 billion a year. Total ODA in the environmental sector is around 30 or $40,000 a year. The slice of that that's specifically for ag forestry and fisheries is even smaller so not much ODA has been flowing to forestry and forest restoration and we're also emerging from a period when the planting of trees declined and these are data from the latest forest resources assessment by FAO which shows that in every major region of the global south tree planting during the decade 2010 to 2020 was less than 2002 2010. So we face some significant challenges in promoting forest restoration and the implication is that we need to use available funds cost effectively get as much restoration as possible for the use of funds but also attract additional funds by making a stronger case that restoration is worth it. Let me now tell you a bit more about the tool and how it may be able to help in these regards. To begin what do we mean by forest restoration in seed plan? We adopt a broad definition which is the establishment of tree dominated ecosystems that supply forest goods and services the types of services that are expected to come from forest those could be provisioning services such as fuel wood or timber harvest sequestration of carbon provision of biodiversity habitat improvement of water quality and and so on. The conception of forest restoration in the tool is not limited to forests of naturally generated native species that's an important component of forest restoration but we adopt a broader view of restoration which includes planted forests includes introduced species however in we've set up this tool so that it does not focus on perennial tree crops such as oil palm orchards rubber so we're really focusing on tree dominated ecosystems that supply what would conventionally be thought of as forest related goods and services. They hear some key features of the the tool and we'll talk first about inputs into it and then about outputs. The tool is designed so that users can provide key input. A first type of input that's very important is to select the area of interest or ALI what's the country group of countries or region within a country that users are interested in so users get to select this. Next users rate the importance of different potential restoration benefits to them and currently the tool has four types of benefits local livelihoods wood production biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration so users will rate the relative importance of each of these benefits to them and we expect that different stakeholders would rate these benefits differently. These first two layers on local livelihoods and wood production do use data that's newly created by the c-plan team. Users can apply constraints and I'll show you a list of those later these refer to particular ecological and socioeconomic risks that affect the feasibility of restoration and advanced users can upload their own customized data data layers if they have access to those layers. The tool comes with built-in data layers based on the best available data sets that we were able to to find and process but users in particular countries may have access to better data than we did. So users provide input which enables them to tailor the tool to their purposes and then the tool provides the users with spatial information maps that show locations of uh restoreable areas and their features. The tool also provides information in chart form and numerical form and very importantly it provides a restoration suitability index and this is an index on a one to five scale with five indicating a higher level of suitability and you can interpret this as a relative benefit cost ratio for roughly one kilometer grid cells. So cells with higher values as index are ones where restoration is more suitable and the benefits portion of this takes advantage of the input that the that users provide okay the ratings they provide on the relative importance of different benefits so those get weighted according to users ratings and then the cost portion of this accounts for both the opportunity cost of the land and also the cost of getting trees to regenerate on that land. The geographical scope of the tool is not completely global. The tool focuses on low and middle income countries it has data for 139 such countries they're shown in green here these are countries where there is significant restoration potential but also where often information on socioeconomics socioeconomics of restoration is more limited so we we've focused the tool on these countries currently within those countries the tool identifies potential restoration sites and it does that by beginning with information on where trees can grow and that's from a paper published in science two years ago by Jean-François Bastin and others so start with the areas where trees can grow and then identify those locations where the actual tree covers less than the potential and so those will be the potential restoration sites where there's literally room to grow and then the tool also removes urban areas so this is a tool that's focused on restoration in rural areas. Constraints I mentioned the tool provides users with the opportunity to apply constraints which reflect ecological and socioeconomic risks I'll give you one example terrestrial eco region the tool includes information on terrestrial eco regions one of those terrestrial eco regions is natural grasslands so these are areas where under natural conditions the dominant vegetation would be a grassland if users prefer not to restore tree cover in those areas those areas can be masked out and not included in the restoration plan that the tool provides information on. We've invested a lot of effort in developing improved information on the cost of restoration at this point I'm going to hand the virtual microphone over to my colleague Yuan Yuan Yi who will take you through the development of those cost layers Yuan Yuan okay thank you Jeff and hello colleagues it's my great pleasure to present how the tool has constructed the cost layer basically the cost of reforestation would consist of two parts the first part of the cost information is the opportunity cost of taking off the current piece of land that is currently not used for forestry this would refer to the value of land in whatever it has been used in most cases this would mean the value of land used for crop production or used as pasture land for livestock production a special note is that if a site has a mix of a crop land and the pasture land the seed plan tool uses crop land opportunity cost the spatial unit of the cost layers is 10 square kilometers in addition to the opportunity cost the second part of the cost of a reforestation is the establishment cost this means the cost of planting trees and we include this cost as maintenance for the first three to five years and the spatial unit of the establishment cost is at the level one administrative subdivisions in most countries this level refers to state or provinces for all the costs they are measured in us dollars per hectare and in 2017 price levels well in the next three slides I will briefly introduce the steps on how we get the estimates for each cost so now here are the steps on how we estimate the value of land in crop production so firstly uh yeah firstly our estimation is based on the global crop revenue data set called map spam produced by the international food policy research institute we obtained the most recent one for year 2010 and greeted for each 10 square kilometers grid cell secondly we use the national data of value of agricultural production in the FAO stats data set and updated the map spam's crop revenue from 2010 to the 2017 price levels the third step is key that we determine the share of the revenue attributed to land for the land share we use economic and the statistical model to estimate the land share using the rulers data set provided by the FAO's rulers project team the rulers project has synthesized the survey data from the work banks living standards measurement study in a large number of low and middle income countries the last step is to multiply the crop revenue by the land share and this gives us the annual return from land used for crop in 2017 then we convert annual return using the seven percent discount rate for forward-looking purpose assuming in the future an annual discount rate of seven percent we divide the annual land value by this discount rate to get an estimate of opportunity cost of taking up the crop land this is the overall methodology of estimating the opportunity cost of restoration on crop land thank you Jeff the next slide please yeah so for land used as pasture land that raises animals for livestock production we use similar strategy to get the estimate of opportunity cost of the land the only difference is a map that shows which land areas are pasture land and the revenue of livestock production on the pasture land part we use as as the map shows we used 2000 FAO pasture map then we use statistical methods to update this map into a 2015 map of pasture land excuse me and then on livestock we use the 2010 gridded livestock of five main animals including buffalo cattle goat horse and sheep from the gridded livestock of the world on harvard data verse and using the national data of FAO's livestock systems on stocks and the production values we update the 2010 gridded livestock to 2015 aggregate revenue also at 10 square kilometer grid cell level then it would be the similar steps to multiplying the aggregate revenue by the land share of livestock production attributed to land that we imputed the land shares from the survey data finally dividing the land value by the discount rate of seven percent so we get the opportunity cost of taking up the pasture land well the next slide is on forest establishment cost so yeah the strategy is different on on the estimation of the establishment cost we use the strategy that can be named as a downscaling strategy the method mainly takes four steps in step one we extract cost estimates from wood bank project documents including the afforestation and reforce station projects that the wood bank sponsored in many countries then in step two we obtain spatial data on variables that could be affecting cost these variables include data from a gridded global data sets for GDP and the demographic changes over the period from 1990 to 2015 and the next we use statistical models to estimate the relationship that how these cost estimates could be affected by the spatial variables economic variables and the demographic variables then the final step is based on the statistical relationship estimated in step three we use the parameters to predict the costs for each level one subdivisions such as where the polygon areas represent okay in the last slide on the cost information Jeff and I would like to give you an illustration on how greatly the costs vary globally for example the opportunity cost for cropland has a median value of a bit higher than 2000 us dollars per hectare and the average is a little over 3000 us dollars here in these pictures as you see values in the right end is 5000 us dollars or 200 us dollars it doesn't mean that the actual largest value is 5000 or 200 respectively we have cut off the data for display for display purpose only there are more values after the right tail then okay for the opportunity cost for pasture land the median value is quite low is roughly like 20 us dollars and the majority of the gridded cells of pasture land have very low land return as the distribution suggests that most are lower than 100 us dollars then lastly as you can see from the bottom the graph the graph shows the average establishment of cost as shown by the normal distribution and the peak of these normal distribution shows that is around 1500 us dollars and it varies greatly over places yeah okay so I just stop for now and hand it over to Jeff thank you thank you very much you on you on I just want to note that the emphasis here was on in terms of establishment cost was on cost associated with planting trees the tool does include information on the variability of success in natural regeneration as well as we we recognize that not only tree planting but natural regeneration is also a way to restore for us now you know every tool has you know is better for some tasks than others and seed plans no exception here's some key limitations of seed plan it does not provide information on specific tree species that's information that would have to be developed locally it does not provide information on specific regeneration methods aside from broadly providing information on different aspects of natural regeneration and artificial regeneration at least some aspects of those but the detail on which method should be applied in which locations when you get you know start looking at particular types of natural regeneration or artificial regeneration would have to be left to users who would draw on more detailed local information and the benefits in this tool do not account for interdependencies between sites so the way the tool set up individual sites have been assigned benefit values but we recognize that the value of a site can depend very much on what's happening in sites around it the current formulation the tool does not include those kinds of interdependencies and so what this all means is that this tool is going to be more useful for planning at larger scales where the the purpose is to identify locations where restoration appears to be more suitable and then where more targeted in-depth planning exercises can be conducted i'll close by noting there are many restoration stakeholders in addition to landholders and local communities and we've designed a tool to try to be useful to this broader range of stakeholders too those include national forestry agencies international organizations non-profit conservation organizations and also the private sector and private sector organizations and i will close by noting that engaging this last group may be particularly important given the financing challenge that we face with respect to forest restoration i'll stop there i thank you very much for your attention and i look forward to your questions and comments and suggestions on how we can improve this tool so thank you many thanks jeff and you and you for the presentation and for the overview of the tool providing the key features which actually allow users to prioritize different restoration benefits while also applying constraints on ecological and sociogenic elements but the category that jeff mentioned are there are some limitations um yeah actually yeah nice very nice to see the process of developing the costary years that you and you and presented which will provide a transparency to the tools approach i see um yeah nice questions are coming in i really encourage our colleagues to continue to pause questions in the Q and A box approaches now i'll directly turn the floor over to another set of colleagues for the second presentation which is the demonstration of the tool and to introduce karis tenison and john delgar both from especially informatics group to seek karis is the director of the environment mapping program and john is a research scientist specializing in remote sensing applications so based on the approach and data layers just presented by jeff and you and karis and jeff sorry john have developed and finalized the seed land and today they will work us through key functionalities available on the user interface so karis and john i'll pass it over to you hello good morning everybody um so now that you have a good sense of the input layers going into the tool and the objectives we wanted to show you a quick demonstration of what the tool looks like um it's composed of two parts so the first is where you do your user input it includes a questionnaire selection of the study region um in some constraints using all the input layers that jeff and you on you on just gave you information about and then it presents you with some results so i'll pause here and have john go ahead and play the video and then um we can talk about um the next steps of how you might want to test it and pilot it in new region let me share this and we're sharing a video today because it is not always a great idea to do live demos um karis can you just confirm my screen is showing yep right restoring forested landscapes offers profound benefits including storing carbon improving biodiversity purifying water and air buffering against floods and extreme weather and providing people with food and other resources restoring degraded forests presents an opportunity to improve the lives and livelihoods of people around the world a new planning tool from the food and agricultural organization of the united nations helps countries and restoration actors grasp that opportunity the tool is adaptive customizable and open source c-plan the restoration planning tool will be integrated inside the sapal dashboard as an application c-plan incorporates layers on benefits costs and constraints once opened you will see a landing page that provides information about the tool and the partners who helped develop it the tool is separated into four computation steps and two result steps in the first step you will be asked to select an area of interest for your study that will be used throughout the tool two selection options are available the first is to select an administrative boundary and the second is to use custom geometries administrative boundaries include country borders and first or second level administrative boundaries custom geometries allow you to draw a shape use an earth engine asset or upload a file to define the area of interest the focus of c-plan is on low and middle income countries which have great restoration potential but face more informational and financial constraints than high income countries do once the boundary is selected you can move to the questionnaire the questionnaire section is split into two steps restoration constraints and benefits constraints are a set of criteria that limit areas available for restoration they can be activated or deactivated by selecting them inside the drop-down menu the constraints are broken into four categories land use constraints include specific land use covers biophysical constraints include rainfall water stress elevation and slope socio-economic constraints include protected areas population density and property rights protection and forest change constraints include information on deforestation rates climate risk and natural regeneration selected constraints will display a short description describing how they restrict areas from the map restoration benefits are a set of goals for your restoration project they can be adjusted by using the tool to rank your priorities by importance the different type of benefits include local livelihoods wood production carbon sequestration and biodiversity and conservation each type of benefit includes one or more layers that will be used in the calculation selecting no importance will exclude those layers from the calculation once you've provided constraint and benefit information in the questionnaire the module will evaluate how to weigh each input according to your preference in the customized layers input table you will find all the layers that will be used to compute the restoration dashboard users remain in complete control of the tool and can manually replace each layer if the default layer is insufficient replacing a layer is simple clicking on the action button will open a pop-up window displaying a description of the layer an option to change the layer or the layer units and a preview of the layer once the modifications are set you can click the save button or click cancel to use the default layer the tool checks that a user has access to the custom layer they want to set if the custom layer is not accessible the default layer will be used the recipe section can be used to load the weights constraints an area of interest from a previously saved model each time you run the tool a recipe will be saved to your support account clicking the validation button will load the data from the uploaded recipe or use the inputted information from the previous steps information is then displayed about the computation showing what parameters the tool will use to run the calculations the results map is created by clicking on the compute button after a few moments the map will zoom to the area of interest the map indicates priority areas of restoration potential based on your specific ranking of restoration constraints and benefits it represents the ratio of the weighted sum benefits divided by the costs costs include both opportunity and establishment costs areas that are blue indicate a higher return on investment while areas mapped in red indicate a lower return the map could show for instance the precise areas where restoring forests would yield the largest potential increases in carbon storage food provisioning or flood control relative to the costs and risks comparing the relative magnitude of this indicator between sites can help identify which sites offer a high return on investment to refine your analysis you can compare areas that seem promising in the dashboard investigate the restoration suitability map and identify some areas that seem promising once identified you can draw a boundary around these regions to run summary statistics for comparison in the dashboard the dashboard presents a detailed analysis of the estimated benefits costs and constraints this information can help you assess trade-offs and restoration priorities between regions of interest the first section provides a summary of restoration suitability by region this summarizes the area of promising cost-effective restoration locations from low to high for instance we can see that in the primary area of interest there are relatively few very high restoration suitability areas however when looking at our first sub area of interest we see there is much more high and very high suitability we can also compare each area of interest by their input benefits the benefits section shows what the average value of each layer is by their region this can give insight into each layer and aid in selection between potential sites each layer has a drop-down text to display details about the layer similarly the cost portion of the reports sums up the cost inputs for each area of interest lastly the constraints area of the report shows the percent coverage of each constraint this lets decision makers know which areas are being excluded from consideration of restoration in both the primary area of interest and the sub areas of interest forest restoration requires that decision makers consider many biophysical socioeconomic and other factors when deciding where to pursue restoration interventions to ensure the highest chances of success c-plan combines data on where tree restoration is biophysically possible with regional socioeconomic data to identify areas where restoring forest is both technically feasible and financially viable it helps zero in on priority areas where planting trees would pay the greatest social and environmental dividends this tool provides a medium to quantify user priorities and help them better understand how restoration interventions will help achieve their goals so that was a quick snapshot of how to work with the tool the one thing I'll suggest is the tool is available so we encourage everybody to check it out and see what the results look like in your region of interest the nice thing about the tool is the calculations run really fast so you can input a couple different scenarios and see what the results look like for those of you that have worked planning restorations you know there are a lot of potential benefits that come out of these restoration projects and there are a lot of communities and stakeholders that the benefits will impact so we also suggest you know interacting with your stakeholders and coming up with a list of benefits of interest constraints of interest and then you can use that information to run alternative scenarios and then present those you know suggested high return areas back to your stakeholders so we hope that this is a nice interactive tool that you can use for community engagement as you continue through the decision making process of where to plan or how to plan your restoration activities I'll turn it back to you Yoshihiko all right great yeah thank you so much Karis and Joan for the demonstration and very nice to see this step by step description and just to reiterate the greatest advantage of this tool is I think the data areas are customizable depending on the data availability for the area of interest I want to I also wanted to highlight the great contribution by our FAO colleague Kirik Rambo in developing the finalizing the tools user interface I really appreciate your work so um thanks again to all the speakers so far as mentioned by some colleagues already this tool is currently in the testing phase and being tested primarily by government colleagues in several countries we will shift to the Q&A session shortly but before we move on I would like to turn the floor quickly to colleagues working at the country level Maria Kono from Siva Gardens and from your high approaches for my conversation from Vietnamese Forest Inventory and Planning Institute FIPP Maria has been coordinating and coordinating the consultation meetings with country colleagues to collect feedback and has recently organized a focus group with Vietnamese colleagues so she will be able to share such efforts and also future plans for rolling out the tool and Hai is a remote sensing specialist at CT working on forest cover mapping and land cover change monitoring who will be able to share some perspectives on the challenges and priorities in research and planning in the country and some initial ideas on how this C plan tool could help with it so I pass the floor first to Maria and onward to Hai thank you Yoshihiko as we heard of really several times today the the tool is really customizable and when we were developing it we had the future users in mind and here we would like to acknowledge that we have been really fortunate that from the beginning of the the development of this tool we had several of our country partners involved in the tool development and here in particular I would like to acknowledge the inputs that we have collected through several focus groups and meetings that we scheduled or held in the past year with colleagues from forestry agencies in the Macon region so that includes Cambodia, Laos PDR and Vietnam as well as colleagues from East Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda and our colleagues from the severe amazonia hub so all this input really helped us to get to the tool in its current state and as it was mentioned earlier this is just the beginning and the tool is really customizable and will further be developed by the future users so how to further engage is in the next few months or a year we are going to work with different country partners at specific landscape levels to test the tool at different scale to test the tool with different data layers, national data layers or even more specific landscape information that they have in order to see how it will perform and how it can help some of their practical decision-making processes so I'm not going to talk a lot about this because it really depends on the on each country context and it will be different for specific purposes but I would like to here I would like to introduce our colleague from Vietnam from the forest inventory and planning institute Pham Ngoc Khai who has been working for many years in many different areas of implementing or using remote sensing for forest decision-making and Khai is going to talk a little bit more about the challenges and priorities for Vietnam when it comes to forest restoration and then also the possibility for using this kind of tool particularly we have one area in mind which is the central highlands of Vietnam which has been one of the priority areas for the Vietnamese government for forest restoration so hi the floor is all yours whenever you are ready yeah thank you Marisa and Rosikito I would like to share my screen yeah in this context of this webinar I would like to share some about information about forest restoration in Vietnam from challenging and priority in Vietnam yeah yeah as you know the Vietnam has been experienced before the 1990 and from 1990 up to now the forest cover in Vietnam are difficult to increase almost about 42 percent in 2020 and through a lot of series of national forest restoration program as six ones and three two seven program is a lot of forest restoration program has been in Vietnam and some recently and some international commitment as a red plus and Vietnamese have also the national strategy for project and improvement the quality of forest and the forest restoration planning is a key feature to identify first to state a past of forest cover and potential area of forest restoration planning and the environment and social impact for forest restoration project and planning also and yes we have for forest restoration planning we have some challenging for information for example here I would like to ask my three important challenging yeah the first is land cover and forest cover in Vietnam are very dynamic and fragment due to economic development and local practice the second one is the we have a lot of inconsistency of data for example here we have a lot of spatial analysis a lot of people inconsistency of data for spatial analysis for forest restoration planning from various of some different scale some different inconsistency with time of data and different information and we have like like social and economic information for making the forest restoration planning and yes for priority we set for best restoration priority in Vietnam in forest sector we are focused right now we focus on three sector the first one is a enrichment planting and assisted natural regression in the natural forest we focus on the natural forest and reforestation from unused land is the main focus of natural forest and affliction for forest planting and we also extend the rotation lighter we'll introduce a lot of some native species for with long-term rotation and for forest restoration priority area we focus on the main tree tire forest we focus on the projection forest the second one is a spatial use forest either focus on the natural park or natural reserve area and the third one is a we also focus on the projection forest for affliction and right now in Vietnam we have a lot of we have a equation and for forest reforestation planning we are we are focused on the center highland where there is the have been a big period a lot of default deforestation from 2000 up to now and the the Vietnamese government is a focus on the the area for making the planning for reforestation yes it is some my some it ends my presentation thank you thank you very much maria and hi for those presentations and maria for nicely actually summarizing the capacity development aspects and also hi for sharing the challenge and challenges and priorities in the country context hi yeah please stop sharing the screen yeah thanks so much yeah we do record you are further engaging with carriages and piloting the tools to win the central highland areas so i think um this will serve as a good introduction to the q&a session and hopefully we'll trigger further questions from the participants so finally are we now going to Q&A session with all of you oh no i now would like to pass over to my colleague Yelena Finegold for moderating the session who is an FAO forestry officer working on you know about the geospatial solutions who also has been working on the c plan development we are running a bit late but still i think we have sufficient time to discuss so Yelena over to you i think we still have more than 20 minutes to discuss thanks so much Yoshiko and thank you colleagues for the very interesting presentations and overview of the c plan tool it's been a great journey uh with this group developing this tool and we're really looking to to the audience and for our users for feedback to uh further develop and enhance this tool and it was also really great to hear from uh from hi our colleague from Vietnam to hear about some of the ambitions in Vietnam for restoration and how this tool can potentially be used to identify areas that are suitable for restoration so we have quite a few uh question and answers in the q&a already uh so i'll just jump right in and start with a question to Jeff and Yuan Yuan first thank you for your excellent presentation that gave insight into the methodology used by c plan and the different layers that are available in the tool and different users might be interested in running this analysis at different scales so Jeff as you mentioned an international uh conservation organization uh might be interested on running this at a macro level or comparing multiple countries while a small NGO might be focused on a particular district for identifying areas for planting so what are the limitations of running the tool at a smaller scale and we also have a question directly from uh Davidson Lloyd asking how this tool can be applicable to small island states with limited or national location specific climate and land cover data thanks Yelena great questions first on on scale it's our hope that this tool will be able to be used at multiple scales from the macro to the micro but there are going to be some limitations and and so on the macro side we have some country level measures in there but of course conditions can vary within countries and the country level measures not going to reflect that I mean I give as an example we have a country risk premium that's been developed to guide investors on locations where they likely face the fewest risks they make an investment now those variables or that that variable is developed at a national level but the risk to investment could vary within a country the tool is not going to pick that up but of course users may have much more detailed information about a particular country than we have as the developers after all there's some 139 countries in this this tool and we're not experts on on all of them so that additional information or knowledge of a particular country could be brought to bear so there will be variation within countries that some of the variables will pick up but others won't so that gets to the macro question that the micro question is some of the the layers are relatively coarse we mentioned our opportunity cost layers at 10 square kilometers we just don't believe it's possible to develop reliable estimates with finer precision than that but again local users will have a better understanding within particular locations of how land values may vary so at the macro level or the micro level there will be some limits based on the the resolution of the layers and in in general you know as we get to to you know more and more local levels you're getting to smaller and smaller grid cells the tool is going to become less and less accurate and so as I said the the the tool is really intended for larger scale planning which will help to identify areas that look look more suitable for restoration but then the detailed work within those is going to have to be done by restoration stakeholders to bring in additional knowledge that they may have additional sources of of information in an example would be our estimates of tree growth rates which is part of the the benefit related to wood production you know tree growth rate can vary tremendously just moving from one side of ridge to another which is a change which could be just a few meters okay as you walk across a ridge the tool does not account for that kind of detail so there will be some limitations indeed on the question about small island states so we've drawn information from the best available data sources that we could if the the states are really small then the resolution the data you know is going to be pretty coarse for them and so I think you know I would love to hear more from those who are from small island states or work in small island states you know more from you on where you see the issues with using the tool if you play around with it some but we've attempted to construct the variables for all of the 139 low and middle income countries as as best we could we've certainly not left out small island states I just I also want to mention Daniella asked a question about what's meant by tree species in here and I was typing an answer and I think it disappeared I think it was it was sent something got messed up with my with that function or with my use of it Daniella just to respond here and this does have some bearing on what we're just talking about the from the standpoint of establishment costs in a sense we're looking at generic planting of trees but on the other hand there is spatial variation in there depending on the socioeconomic conditions and ecological conditions so we we have some reflection of that the benefits however implicitly reflect different types of trees so the benefit in terms of wood production is going to be based on plantation grown tree growth rates whereas our biodiversity benefit is a function of biodiversity and tactness and threatened in an endangered species and so that the tool does not specifically say which species should be grown that's left to the users they're going to have more information on local conditions but it will identify what the potential is for achieving certain benefits if species that are consistent with those benefits for example if you want to restore biodiversity then you would not necessarily want to plant monocultures of introduced species okay but if you were to use species that are consistent with that goal and the tool will give you information on what the potential biodiversity benefit could be and Daniel I hope that helps answer your question if not then fire away and I'll follow up. Thanks Jeff for that very comprehensive answer and I see another very interesting question that probably can be answered by yourself in Yuan Yuan we have a question here from Sebastian and his question is to what extent does the tool include the assessment of non-monetary costs benefits and costs such as cultural values place attachment etc are the are their prospects to develop more non-monetary indicators. Okay so the tool is not a valuation tool it does not predict what the values of different uses of forests are it identifies types of benefits and asks the user how important those different benefits are we currently do not have in there an indicator for cultural values and a reason is just the difficulty of obtaining information on those values and you know for this tool we need spatially explicit information so we need information on how cultural values may vary by location we don't have that information if you're aware of a source that could point us to that then we could build that into the tool but currently that's not a value that's built in there I mean there is a biodiversity layer and if an important aspect of biodiversity is its its cultural significance then by putting a high rating on biodiversity you'd be signaling that you value that cultural significance of biodiversity highly so it could be included indirectly in that way but there's no direct there's no valuation in the tool and there's currently no benefits indicator that is specifically linked to cultural values and Yuan Yuan would you like to compliment at all yeah so I agree with what Jeff Jeff's answers and I just following Jeff's answers and I'd like to emphasize the possibilities that users could upload their own data sets with finer resolutions or better or very even more detailed information on costs constraints benefits and so on for example yeah thank you so much both then another I see a few questions also asking about the functionality of the tool so perhaps we can ask those to Cart and John I see one question from from Faisal asking how can the accuracy of the output be confirmed so and perhaps we can also then after that answer question from Sonya asking about how the actual results will be exported and will it be possible to see those in PDF excel perhaps a map output so if you could just talk about the the output tool thanks maybe I'll respond to the accuracy and then I also invite Jeff and Yuan Yuan to add to that and then John you can talk about the how to save the results so the accuracy of the layers is a really good question I'll just say you know the first kind of initial output is an indicator of how suitable they are for restoration so it's harder to assess accuracy there and a lot of these estimates that go into it are projected benefits based on these global data sets so I don't know that that we'd recommend assessing accuracy of these you know specific indicators or even some of the input layers but what we would recommend is if you have you know national data sets or more specific data sets where you have used local data that calibrate them you can kind of assess you know the the precision of those estimates you could go out and do some accuracy assessments but it would require quite a lot of field work so some of the input that is going into the model includes things like you know indicators of biodiversity species richness that are there in the region carbon storage so if you have national NFI data you could maybe you know assess how good that layer is but overall instead of assessing accuracy I think the key thing here is you know engaging with your stakeholders who know the region and looking at the map results and seeing do the the mapped areas with high value make sense do they you know align with where you think there are you know high conservation regions or carbon rich regions and hopefully they do and then also you know based on your knowledge of the land covers so think about where you have agriculture or if you have those national land covered data sets you can integrate those and see what they look like and then a lot of the information is you know kind of projections of what benefits you would anticipate seeing if you restore these lands so those are a little bit harder to do the measurements until after you restore the lands as well and you know there's always some uncertainty with the future in terms of just risks that are going into and affecting the restoration to take into account so and maybe I'll open this up to Jeff and you want to provide some alternative ideas or feedback on it. That's great Karas I mean all I'd say is that developing some measures of of accuracy is is important and you know that's something that we're working on doing but haven't done yet and it's going to be more possible for some of the layers than for others but we do intend to come up with some estimates which would provide at least you know rough confidence bounds on the measures developed. And the second question was asking about the outputs of the tool John you can take that one. Yeah definitely so at the moment you can export the results map either as a TIF to your small account which you can then download locally or export it as a earth engine image asset. Currently the dashboard is exported as a just JSON file but we are working on finding a way to export the dashboard in a nicer format such as a PDF and also working on a way to convert the GeoJSON format to something that's a little nicer for people to work with such as a CSV. Thanks all for the great answers and I see that there has been there's a lot of interest to use this tool we have a lot of enthusiasm with the participants here and people writing in the chat that you know that they'd like to actually get their hands on it and test it. So maybe John if you can just walk someone through how they could actually get to that tool. Yeah so the the tool is located in the SAPAL platform so if you go to SAPAL.io I believe and then if you have an account you can log in but if you don't have an account you you need to sign up for one but once you've logged into SAPAL you can go to the application section it will be the little icon that looks like a wrench on the left hand side and then in the search bar of the application section if you just type in cplan the tool will will populate in the search and clicking on it will start running the tool and that's how you get to it. Thanks and and then maybe our last question we just have a few minutes left to Yoshihiko and Maria I think there are also many are interested to provide feedback further feedback to the tool maybe on layers that they'd like to see or further engagement with our group on exploring the use of their tool for actual restoration planning so so what are some of the future plans? Yeah I can take that question first maybe and then yeah Maria please feel free to compliment so yeah thanks very much Yelena for the question. We do appreciate your feedbacks from Kari good so that we can further improve the functionality on data layers so we have indeed prepared a form feedback form I hope Perik or Maria can share the link in the chat box so somewhere so I do encourage our colleagues to share your comments feedback or even questions here so we'll be able to respond to you through their contact information you will provide there and for the training opportunities I think Maria has already answered several questions in the Q&A box but yeah as she mentioned there are indeed some plans for piloting the tool with support from the SuperCab on NASA's survey heads so if you're working in the country or close to the country or we will be organizing the workshop you might be able to join us but just do contact us so that we can further discuss the opportunity. Did I answer all the questions? I think so I think so and if we haven't answered any of the questions or if you'd like to rewatch us we will be sharing the recording and also some follow-up notes with the Q&A with all of the questions from participants and answers from our panelists so thank you so much for this really interactive and dynamic Q&A session and I'd like to pass the floor back to Yoshihiko to close it off. Great thank you so much Elena and I see Maria just joined, turned on the video, I wanted to compliment something I produced so but if not I can proceed to the closing. Yeah please proceed to the closing I think yeah we can discuss with everybody specifically depending on their context and their work we are open to collaborate and do trainings as needed. Great yeah thanks so much everyone for the panelists for the rich discussion and questions from the participants indeed so these are really informative and help for us to further improve the tool so as Julian mentioned at the very beginning the tool will keep evolving with your feedback and as I mentioned we have prepared a form to further feedback from you so please do take a moment and provide yourselves there. So yeah as also mentioned webinar recording and presentation materials will be shared in due course along with which we'll be sharing short answers perhaps to the questions posed by audience but perhaps we couldn't answer three in which case yeah we'll be sharing the short answers to that and finally I wanted to turn the floor one last time to Julian for a few words to conclude the webinar but I think he had to run to another meeting so I would like to wrap this up on his behalf so a really big thanks to you all the speakers and also of course to everyone joining us and speaking us around I hope you enjoyed the webinar and got some insight on how CPLAN tool could help plan your restoration work in different contexts and landscapes and do hope to see many of you in our future workshops. That's all from my side, take care everyone, goodbye.