WHO SPEAKS FOR THE FOREST? LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, PARTICIPATORY MAPPING AND COLLABORATIVE EVALUATION FOR GIS ANALYSIS IN THE TROPICS OF CENTRAL BALI, INDONESIA

Abstract. This paper describes a land survey of the Bedugul area in Central Bali that was constructed using multi-temporal and multi-spectral data collected from a new class of commercially available satellites to produce detailed land cover mappings. The paper discusses the significance of the land area under investigation, including difficulties in reading land cover features in the tropics. It describes participatory field mapping efforts set in place in order to complement the reading of remote sensing assets and our attempts to represent land use features of particular interest to a local NGO. We further discuss the challenges and opportunities of representing land cover and use scenarios that satellite assets can only partially capture. We use band operations and object-based classification methods to represent change in settlement activity in the area under observation. We also describe a collaborative cloud-based analysis and evaluation pipeline that facilitates the processing of different sources of remote sensing data as well as the representation of various types of land use scenarios defined with the assistance of local knowledge.