Land Use/Land Cover and Forest Canopy Density Monitoring of Wafi-Golpu Project Area, Papua New Guinea

This study aims to examine the use of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) technology in land use/land cover mapping to aide sustainable planning and development in the Wafi-Golpu project area. At the same time, this study examines an existing method of Forest Canopy Density (FCD) model to estimate forest canopy density of the proposed deforestation site, which is known as the Advanced Exploration Feasibility Study Activities (AEFSA) area within the Wafi-Golpu Project site. The FCD model calculates the forest canopy density using the three (3) indices of vegetation, soil and shadow from the Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) satellite image of year 2013. In this study an attempt has been made to monitor the forest loss or degradation during deforestation in a natural forest stand of the Wafi-Golpu project area using forest FCD mapping and monitoring model and the findings of the study will assist the project planners and developers with their work on forest rehabilitation and reforestation for the purposes of sustainable forest management. The result of the work shows that a considerable amount of forest loss will be undertaken during the AEFSA deforestation exercise and also the findings show that a reliable land use/land cover map will greatly assist sustainable development in a resource project development period.

Change Detection of Land Use and Land Cover over a Period of 20 Years in Papua New Guinea

People have an inherent tenacity to throng coastal regions in pursuit of better living conditions. As such the brisk dynamism of land use/land cover activities in a coastal region becomes obvious. The former keeps changing rapidly due to burgeoning population. A digital change detection analysis is performed with the help of Geographic Information System (GIS) on the Remote Sensing data spanning over last 20 years, complemented by in-situ data and ground truth information. This current research briefly endeavours to find out the nature of change happening in the major three coastal cities of Papua New Guinea (PNG), namely Alotau, capital of Milnebay province;Lae, capital of Morobe province and Port Moresby, capital of Papua New Guinea. Changes in land use and land cover that took place over 20 years have been recorded using Landsat 5 thematic mapper (TM) data of 1992 and Landsat 8 operational land imager (OLI) data. Land use and land cover maps of 1992, and 2013/14, and change detection matrix of 1992-2013/14 are derived. Results show an immensely sprawling urban landscape, evincing about five times growth during 1992 to 2014. At the same time “natural forests” dwindled by 444.96 hectares in Alotau, 6977.25 hectares in Lae and “mangrove” and “grass/shrub land” decreased by 127.78 and 4859.39 hectares respectively around Port Moresby. The above changes owe to ever increasing population pressure, land tenure shift, agriculture and industrial development.

Spatial Analysis of Renewable Energy in Papua New Guinea through Remote Sensing and GIS

Electrification and sustainable energy uses are increasing in Papua New Guinea (PNG) over the last few decades. The bulk of PNG’s population (85%) lives in isolated and dispersed villages in the rural areas. Most of these isolated and dispersed areas are still yet to be connected to an electricity supply.?Papua New Guinea (PNG) is richly endowed with natural resources, but exploitation has been hampered by rugged terrain, land tenure issues, and the high cost of developing infrastructure. The study is focused on mapping of enriched renewable energy zones of the entire country. Different variables related to renewable, like surface albedo index, earth skin temperature, solar?insolation incident, and wind speed are used for this purpose. Three interpolation approaches,?like inverse distance weighted averaging, thin-plate smoothing splines, and kriging, are evaluated to interpolate all variables. Rating and weight sum overlay operation is applied to derive potential?renewable energy zones in this equatorial country. Results show that potential renewable energy distribution is high in Papua New Guinea on the March and September equinoxes. Yearly average distribution of renewable energy source variables is significantly higher in most areas of Manus, New?Ireland, North Solomon, West New Britain, Northern, Central and Milne Bay;a larger portion of East New Britain;the northern part of West and East Sepik, Central, Morobe and eastern part of Madang province. The potential renewable energy distribution data can help to establish sustainable energy production in the country.

Remote Sensing and GIS Application on Forest Resource Mapping and Monitoring in Bulolo District, Morobe Province

Forest resources monitoring are particularly challenging for tropical forest due to their diverse composition and structure and a wide range of stakeholder’s expectations and requirement. New monitoring approaches and control policies directions are required to meet these different challenges. For the past decades, much of the focus of formal forest monitoring and management policy in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been on large scale conventional harvesting to meet national requirements for economic development, with little attention given to community or small area forest management and monitoring. The current management is considered to be unsustainable and, as forest resources from primary forests are exhausted. This has resulted in extensive cutover forest areas being left to degrade over time. Forest reserve has suffered seriously and if the present trend of deforestation continues;it is just a matter of time when the whole reserve would have been converted to a bare ground. This study therefore examined the integration of remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) application on forest resource mapping and monitoring in Bulolo district, Morobe province. Landsat satellite imageries for 1992, 2002 and 2014 were used to classify and identify forest changes through change detection techniques. A GIS database of land use categories and their location within 24 years (1992-2014) were generated and analysed with the aid of GIS analytical functions. This function includes area calculation, overlay, and image differencing, supervised classifications, cross tabulations and map representation. The result shows that population growth (anthropogenic) factors among communities around the natural forest imposes a lot of pressure on the natural forest resources. This should also include consideration of the future usage capacity of the forest resources as well as development of the capacity of local forest owner communities to participate in small scale forest management and utilization.