Deforestation & carbon stock monitor

Method

1. 01 — Area of interest. The Mau Forest Complex boundary is assembled from WDPA protected-area blocks and dissolved into a single analysis polygon.
2. 02 — Deforestation. Annual tree cover loss is extracted from the Hansen/UMD Global Forest Change product, clipped to the AOI and converted from pixel counts to hectares.
3. 03 — Carbon. Above-ground biomass is read from ESA CCI Biomass for each available epoch and converted to carbon stock (Mt C) using the standard 0.47 carbon fraction.
4. 04 — Statistics. Loss and carbon series are joined by year, cumulative loss is computed, and carbon stock change is converted to CO₂-equivalent using the 44/12 molecular ratio.

Why it matters

The Mau Forest Complex is the largest of Kenya’s five water towers, feeding the Mara, Sondu, Njoro and Ewaso Ng’iro river systems. Losing canopy here does not just release carbon — it reduces dry-season river flow, increases erosion into Lake Victoria and the Mara ecosystem, and undermines the tea, livestock and tourism economies downstream.

Quantifying loss and carbon in the same frame lets conservation agencies, counties and carbon-project developers argue for interventions with evidence rather than anecdote — and to measure whether restoration is actually working.

Interactive map: the dark outline is the forest complex boundary; the shaded patches are detected tree-cover loss areas. Click any patch for its attributes, and zoom in to inspect loss at block level.