Monitoring and Evaluation of Peatland Assessment in SE Asia by Satellite (PASSES)

PASSES (Peat Land Assessment in SE Asia by Satellite) was a collaborative development project led by CGI, a global end-to-end IT and business process services company based in London.

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​The project was a partnership of several institutions based in the UK:

Geomatic Ventures Limited (GVL)
University of Leicester 
University of Nottingham
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
Liverpool John Moores University
IPE Triple Line Consulting (Dala Institute was sub-contracted by IPE Tripleline to carry out fieldwork activity in Indonesia).
 

The project scientific personnel were:

Thomas Lankester was an Earth Observation (EO) Technical Architect with 25+ years of systems engineering and EO application experience. He had been Technical Manager for the development and operations of complex EO production environments such as the ESA High Level Product Generation (HiProGen) service, as well as having been involved in the development of the UK Climate and Environmental Monitoring from Space (CEMS) facility.
Andrew Sowter was GVL’s CTO and had almost 30 years’ experience in the processing and interpretation of SAR data. His InSAR solution had formed the main basis for the creation of GVL, specifically his invention of the ISBAS technique which allowed precise measurement of the rates of land motion over vegetated land cover, including peat land. In 2014, he was the winner of the prestigious Copernicus Masters prize, awarded by the EU, ESA and the EEA.
Susan Page was a Centre for Landscape and Climate Research (CLCR) member and held a Chair in Physical Geography. Her research addressed ecology, carbon dynamics, impacts of land use and fire on tropical peat lands; peat land restoration, ecosystem service provision and livelihoods. She had participated in multinational research on SE Asian peat lands; was the first to draw attention to the scale of carbon emissions from Indonesian peat land fires; and was Lead Author on fire emissions from organic soils for the IPCC (Wetlands Supplement, 2013). 
Kevin Tansey was a CLCR member and a Professor of Remote Sensing. His research focussed on characterising vegetation on the Earth's surface and identifying disturbance indicators (specifically fire, deforestation, degradation and drainage) of vegetation. He was a member of the Global Observation of Forest and Land Cover Dynamics Fire Implementation Team (GOFC-GOLD Fire IT).
Doreen Boyd was Associate Professor and Reader in the School of Geography at UoN and had a 16-year research track record working with remotely sensed data. Her research had been undertaken in both academic and commercial environments. She had won funding from the Royal Society (South East Asian Rainforest Research Programme), the Japanese Space Agency, EPSRC, NERC and AHRC. 
Chris Evans led the CEH Peat Land and Coastal Biogeochemistry Group, and was a visiting professor at Bangor University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He had worked on SE Asian peatlands for over a decade, and had published scientific and policy articles relating to SE Asian peatland management in high-impact journals including Nature, Science, Global Change Biology and Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 
Stephanie Evers was a Senior Lecturer in Freshwater Biology and Wetland Biogeochemistry. She had been working on SE Asian peatlands for 6 years and had been based in the region for 5 years prior to starting at LJMU. She had multiple ongoing projects in Malaysia linked to assessing the environmental degradation of peatlands under varied land uses and development of effective management strategies.
Shoa Asfaha was an IPE Triple Line M&E, gender and inclusion, forest governance and climate change specialist, with more than 25 years’ experience in international development. She was the Head of Forest Governance and Climate Change at IPE Triple Line, and held a PhD in Economic Geography.
Martin Wright was an international development specialist with over 30 years of experience in project and grant programme management, M&E. He was part of the IPE Triple Team working on the DFID Forest Land Use and Governance (FLAG) programme in Indonesia.
Aidy Halimanjaya was an Indonesian consultant with 10 years of research and consultancy expertise in forestry and climate change mitigation. She had extensive experience in impact assessment and M&E in Indonesia, Brazil and Peru. She had co-designed an innovative method to assess the outcomes of a $30m climate change mitigation forestry programme with CIFOR and ODI.
 

PASSES was supported by the UK’s Space Agency in collaboration with the UK’s International Climate Fund through International Partnership Programme II.