Professor Stephen Young (Geography and Sustainability) and master’s student Danny Szottfried (Geo-Information Sciences) traveled to Honduras (April 18-25, 2023) to teach local conservation organizations how to use drones and process geo-spatial data. The Mesoamerican Development Institute sponsored their visit. Honduras, and much of Central America, is currently experiencing extensive deforestation due to expanding coffee production. Global demand for coffee is rapidly growing, putting pressure on tropical regions throughout the world to increase coffee production.
Specifically, professor Young and Mr. Szottfried worked with the Café Solar Coffee Cooperative, members of the Mesoamerican Development Institute and the Honduran Youth Conservation Corps (supported by USAID and the US Forest Service) to teach them how to fly drones and map coffee plantations as part of the creation of the Yoro Biological Corridor in Honduras.
The goal of the Corridor is to reforest degraded lands to create a forest connection with Honduran National Parks where old-growth forest cover can be found. The drone mapping of coffee plantations will help find areas where coffee is not grown and where reforestation can take place. Coffee farmers will receive money through a European carbon offset program to plant trees and maintain forest cover, eventually returning forest cover to a denuded landscape and providing habitat for threatened wildlife such as the Quetzal, protecting vital water supplies, sequestering carbon, and improving the economic livelihood of the coffee farmers. The coffee farmers will receive annual carbon offset payments based on the mapping of the region by drones which will validate the reforestation and maintenance of the trees. The youth being trained will also have future conservation jobs mapping and monitoring the region with drones.
Danny Szottfried is a master’s student at Salem State University in the Geo-Information Sciences program in the Geography and Sustainability department. Danny will be graduating in May of 2023 and is now an expert in droning, mapping, and other geo-spatial techniques. Due to his expertise Mr. Szottfried ran the training in Honduras, which entailed one day of lectures and five days of hands-on fieldwork. The students that Danny trained will now run the mapping program and train other crews as they will ultimately map over 1,500 coffee plantations.
When Danny was an undergraduate in the GIS-Cartography program at Salem State University he received the “Michael Ruane Award for Excellence in Digital Cartography” as the top GIS student in the department. He currently works for New England Civil Engineering Corp. here in Salem, where a number of other Salem State GIS graduates work.
The Mesoamerican Development Institute heard about Salem State University when professor Young and graduate student Jeannette Maranda (Geo-Information Sciences) ran a droning and mapping workshop in Guatemala in November 2022 for 15 conservation organizations across Central America, which was funded by the New England Biolabs Foundation. Salem State University has a wide impact in making our world more sustainable.
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