Community guidelines for accessing forestry voluntary carbon ... - FAO

Chapter 5: Project implementation: field work
3. Rough sketch mapping of the forest area and its key characteristics,
before the actual field work. These sketches should include
key spatial categories such as forest degradation, areas of
deforestation, invasion, zones of conflict with other stakeholders,
historical land cover and land use changes.
Detailed steps are provided in:
Peters-Guarin, G. & McCall, M.K. 2010. Community Carbon Forestry for
REDD: Using CyberTracker for Mapping and Visualizing of Community Forest
Management in the Context of REDD. K:TGAL Report, University of Twente,
the Netherlands, and CIGA UNAM, Morelia, Mexico. (Available at http://
www.iapad.org/publications/ppgis/CyberTracker_MMM_forest_carbon_
REDD.pdf)
5.2.2 Stratification of the area
After identifying project boundaries, different categories of forest types
and forest management strategies need to be identified. This information
is required in order to divide the area into compartments according to
their common characteristics. This is important to achieve the level of
accuracy in carbon accounting demanded by the forestry VCM.
In the field, it is possible to distinguish areas from each other based
on common characteristics. These different areas will have different
carbon storage capacities. The process of dividing the project area up in
this way is called stratification (see glossary). Forest type is often used
as the parameter to identify different strata, but project developers
can also use differences in soil type, slope or hydrology. For instance,
some soil types are associated with specific plant communities and
forest types. Technical forestry expertise can be of great assistance
during this process, in order to also match categories with other site
characteristics and risks. Strata can also be defined according to forest
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