Ivory Coast’s forest and wildlife inventory reaches 80% completion

On this occasion, find below the press release produced by ONF Côte d’Ivoire.

National forestry and wildlife inventory: the completion rate approaches 80%

The National Forest and Wildlife Inventory (IFFN) project, which started in January 2019, saw its field operations begin in October 2019. The completion rate of the forest inventory and socio-economic survey was 77% at the end of 2020. This inventory aims to collect forestry data (type of vegetal cover, number of trees inventoried, height of the largest trees, average diameter, tree species, etc.). Regarding socio-economic aspects, a land use check is carried out (forest, agriculture, etc.) on all sample units.

The collection of wildlife data is also ongoing and has reached a rate of 67% by the end of 2020. This involves counting the animal species observed and identified, their tracks, etc.

The IFFN is continuing throughout Côte d’Ivoire and field data collection operations should be completed by the end of March 2021. The data, once collected, will be sent at least once a week by internet to the server based in the premises of ONF Côte d’Ivoire in Abidjan. The processing and analysis of all this data – the server currently has more than one million records – will make it possible to interpret the results, which will serve as a basis for decisions by the Ivorian government, with a view to preserving and rehabilitating the existing forest capital, but also to increasing it. The Ivorian forest has decreased from 7.8 million hectares in 1990 to 3.4 million hectares in 2015.

At the end of June 2021, a final workshop of the IFFN project will present all the results: A precise state of the forest, the fauna and the anthropic pressures on the natural resources will be made public.

Contacts:

• Niagne Albert-Yves Lasme (lnayfr@yahoo.fr, + 225 07 07 08 83 62 / 01 03 33 33 81), MINEF, in charge of the IFFN-CORENA component
• Pascal Cuny (pascal.cuny@onfinternational.com, + 255 07 87 24 48 91), ONFI, Chief Technical Advisor for the IFFN project