International partnerships that provide political and financial contracts are highly needed to conserve tropical rainforests, which are vital reserves of carbon and biodiversity. In this context, the One Forest Vision Initiative (OFVi) is an initiative of President Macron to contribute to the development of science-based methods and products needed to conserve the integrity of biodiversity and carbon pools of tropical forests.

OFVi was launched at the One Forest Summit (Libreville, March 2023). It is part of the international negotiations for the conservation of tropical forests in line with the Paris Agreement. The main objective is to develop cooperative research in terms of co-construction and capacity building, i.e. working with partners in tropical forest countries to help them achieve full capacity and value for their conservation efforts on an internationally recognized scientific basis. The latter must take into account all issues related to forest conservation, such as climate, biodiversity, water, and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.

Such goals require actionable information for forest conservation through accurate and near real-time monitoring of forest degradation, carbon stocks and biodiversity. To date, conventional satellite imagery has been unable to accurately quantify forest carbon stocks and changes, including "hidden carbon emissions" from forest degradation.

The main objective of OFVi is to contribute to the development of transparent and near real-time wall-to-wall monitoring of forest degradation, carbon stocks and biodiversity in tropical forests, with a focus on the African continent. The data produced must be accessible, interoperable and reusable.
The OFVi is organized into five pillars, and this research topic concerns the remote sensing pillar (Pillar 3).

In this area, recent scientific advances have shown that by combining artificial intelligence with high-resolution satellite and airborne imagery, combined with LiDAR observations and ground inventory data, the environmental integrity of forests can be tracked at high resolution, down to the tree level in some forest ecosystems. These methods are still emerging, but have already proven their operational capabilities with very high resolution (3 m) maps of tree cover and biomass for Africa.

Thus, the objective of Pilar 3 is to co-design and develop with African institutions new annual maps of forest attributes (height, structure, functional composition, diversity proxies), above-ground biomass, and activity data related to deforestation and degradation in African rainforests, dry forests, and woodlands. The approach is to exploit advances in artificial intelligence and remote sensing for the fusion of LiDAR, multispectral optical and radar data.
This research topic provides a platform to address the challenge of accurately monitoring tropical forests using advanced remote sensing techniques. It welcomes original research articles, reviews, perspectives, and technical notes related to methods and datasets.

Are you interested in contributing a manuscript to this Research Topic?

One Forest Vision Initiative (OFVi) for Monitoring Tropical Forests: The Remote Sensing Pilar