Green pearls: digital support for reforestation

Haiti faces extreme land degradation, making the country prone to natural hazards and poverty, both undeniably linked. The Haitian Red Cross partnered with the Netherlands Red Cross, 510, and Commonland to roll out a long-term landscape restoration program. Over two decades, this program aims to realize 30 ‘Green Pearls. These are areas where best practices on restoration are combined to retrieve healthy landscapes, making communities more resilient and empowering people economically. Landscape restoration happens in small areas through planting trees and bushes. To carefully identify reforestation zones with the highest possible potential success rate, GIS-based site suitability analysis is applied using several indicators: Elevation (Slope), Soil (Soil PH, Soil Texture, Soil Bulk Density), and Climate (Solar Radiation, Temperature, Rainfall). Data on these indicators was obtained from different, often satellite-based data sources. All resulting layers (maps) per indicator are by default processed as equally important. However, the analysis can be tailored to produce different outcomes depending on the reclassification and weights given by experts to specific indicators. For the La Vallée de Jacmel region in the Haiti case, weighting was applied with the help of local experts. The output is a raster map indicating the locations for planting trees divided into five classes (from most suitable to least suitable). Currently, social indicators such as land ownership are not yet included. Our site suitability method is set up as a model using only open data from global datasets and is, therefore, replicable to other areas. The default model has also been applied to a similar case in the Kayes region in Mali. However, local knowledge on the significance of specific indicators remains indispensable input for the reforestation model. Overall, the site suitability method has proven to be a very useful digital support for holistic land restoration.