Scientists from Indonesia, Germany and the Netherlands win Indonesian Peat Prize

JAKARTA — A team of scientists from Indonesia, Germany and the Netherlands has won a competition two years in the making to come up with a fast, accurate and cost-effective way to map Indonesia’s vast tropical peatlands — an all-important carbon sink that the government wants to conserve. The winner of the $1 million Indonesian Peat Prize, funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, was announced Feb. 2 to coincide with World Wetlands Day, two years after Indonesia’s Geospatial Information Agency (BIG) launched it to select a mapping proposal to serve as the standard for surveying the country’s peatlands. “The BIG is pleased and excited that the prize has produced the best method for mapping peatland that combines accuracy, affordability and timeliness to support the BIG’s work in mapping and providing geospatial data and information,” agency chief Hasanuddin Zainal Abidin said at the announcement in Jakarta. The winner, the International Peat Mapping Team (IPMT), boasts members from Germany’s Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH (RSS), Indonesia’s state-funded Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), and Sriwijaya University in South Sumatra province. The BIG will have two years to fully adapt their methodology into the new peat-mapping standard, although some government agencies are clamoring to start adopting the system immediately. The IPMT proposal combines satellite-based technologies and the airborne high-resolution mapping technique known as lidar — which involves beaming laser pulses at the ground from a plane and recording the reflected rays — with on-the-ground measurements. The team started off…

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