1 RWANDA FOREST COVER MAPPING USING HIGH RESOLUTION AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHS 1 Nduwamungu Jean, Nyandwi Elias, Mazimpaka Jean Damascene, Mugiraneza Theodomir, Mukashema Adrie, Uwayezu Ernest, Rwanyiziri Gaspard and Nzabanita Vital Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing Training and Research Centre, National University of Rwanda (CGIS-NUR) Loiret Building, P.O.Box 212 Butare, RWANDA Corresponding author: jeanduwa@gmail.com; jnduwamungu@nur.ac.rw Tel. (Mobile): +250788484777 ABSTRACT The Government of Rwanda aims at making forestry one pillar of the economic development. In this regard, the vision 2020, which contains major targets that have been set by the government to be achieved by year 2020, fixed 30% as the target to be attained in terms of national forest cover. There is need therefore to monitor constantly reforestation achievements in order to make sure that vision 2020 targets are met. This paper reports on a forest mapping assignment carried out to update the forest cover map of Rwanda including all forested areas of at least 0.25 ha using largely high resolution aerial photographs taken during 2008 aerial survey mission by Swedesurvey. Several hints of visual image interpretation for forest classification were used in order to ease the extraction of forest polygons. After ground truthing (fieldwork confirmation of different forest cover classes) throughout the country, five forest classes in natural forests and thirteen classes in forest plantations were adopted and digitized, cleaned and validated as forest polygons from the orthophotos using Desktop ArcGIS software. The decision on the forest canopy cover was guided by the status indicator matrix grid showing the levels of forest canopy cover from 10% to 90%. Thus, the forest maps were produced from Country to sector levels. In general, forest plantations (> 0.25 ha) covered 43% of total forest cover including shrubland or 81% of total forest cover excluding shrubland. Eucalyptus plantations were dominant making up 89% of all forest plantations in the country. In terms of national forest coverage, the mapped forests (> 0.25 ha) excluding shrubland represent now 16% of the total country area. However, one should bear in mind that this is the situation of 2008 and therefore adding up reforestation achievements since 2008 and the less than 0.25ha forest plots would considerably reduce the gap to achieve the 30% forest cover of Rwanda vision 2020. Key words: Rwanda, Forest cover mapping, Forest classification, forest polygons digitization, interpretation of aerial orthophotos. 1 Paper presented at the Global Geospatial Conference 2013 integrating Africa GIS 2013 and GSDI 14 which was held from 4th to 8th November 2013 at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.