Dr. Bailis and I are consulting on a project that will distribute 100,000 improved stoves in Western Honduras over the next 10 years called Proyecto Mirador. Improved wood stoves will be distributed to households with only basic, less efficient wood stoves. On average, these stoves require 50% less wood to perform the same amount of daily cooking.
There is interest in measuring the impact of the project on forest cover in the region. This will consist of developing a supply and demand map of the region in GIS, then groundtruthing to test for accuracy. Our current “supply” map, a land cover map supplied by the Honduran government, isn’t as accurate as we would like. I need to find high resolution remote sensing imagery for the region and classify the imagery to create a better land cover map. We’re also interested to learn how to distinguish shade coffee from other forest cover types. With this information we can more accurately assess the impacts of this stove distribution program on forests in the region.