Tajikistan Turns to Satellites to Discover How Much Forest It Has Left

In Barvoz village in the Western Pamirs, Zarifkhon Gulchinov watched a green forest near his home become a semi-desert during the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Tajikistan’s civil war left the isolated region short of electricity and coal. Families cut trees to heat their homes and cook. “I also went to the forest for firewood, but I cut down only old and dry trees and bushes,” Gulchinov recalled. He later joined a community forestry program and received five hectares of degraded land to restore. Villagers now plant hundreds of trees and protect young growth from livestock. They also maintain an irrigation canal fed by mountain water. Such places explain why a forest inventory is more than a technical count. A strip of trees can supply fuel or hay. It can also hold a riverbank together and shield fields from erosion. Yet Tajikistan has spent decades without a reliable national picture of where its forests remain or what condition they are in. Counting What the Country Has On July 15, Deputy Forestry Agency Director Davlatali Sharifzoda announced a national inventory using satellite images and field inspections. The work will cover forests under every form of ownership, and its results will support ten-year management plans for each state forestry enterprise. Local coverage has described the exercise as Tajikistan’s first complete forest inventory using satellite data. A World Bank project appraisal says the country last conducted a national inventory in 1990. The current exercise is therefore the first nationwide inventory since independence and the first to use modern mapping methods across the country. The inventory combines Sentinel-2 and RapidEye images with geographic information systems. Machine-learning tools classify forest types, while mobile laser scanners can create three-dimensional models of tree stands. Field teams will still visit selected plots to measure tree diameter and height, and count the number of trees in each area. Their observations will show whether the satellite classifications match conditions on the ground. The work is being carried out by Aerogeodesy Dushanbe and Austria’s Umweltdaten GmbH through the World Bank-backed Tajikistan Resilient Landscape Restoration Project. A June progress update said the team carrying out the inventory had been appointed and work was underway. The project is due to close on September 30, 2027. Why the Numbers Diverge Tajikistan has long been described as one of Central Asia’s least forested countries. The figure most often used is about 3% of the national territory, or roughly 420,000 hectares. The World Bank has also noted that land administered by the Forestry Agency covers a much larger area, but much of that land is pasture rather than forest. Preliminary satellite work has now put forest cover at about 4.7%. The higher estimate does not mean that Tajikistan suddenly gained trees. Better mapping may be capturing sparse woodland and remote areas missed by older records. The final inventory should also separate actual forest cover from land that belongs to the state forest fund but carries little or no tree cover. That distinction affects...