As promised, here is a map of dry dipterocarp in south westish Asia. Wether it’s a good map of dry dipterocarp forest depends on your criteria… I suspect it may be as good as is available anyway. It’s certainly not perfect, and I now face a rather longish verification/improvement process to make it a genuinley good one. But the point is, at larger scales especially, it’s pretty good given the inherent challenges of the cover type.

In this picture (which is just a snapshot, the full deal has waaaay more detail and covers more area) the bright green bits are the indaing forest in question. That’s northern Myanmar, and Bhutan, and maybe a bit of Nepal, and some of India.

Click on the image to expand it (somewhat).

The black part is due to the flight path of the satellite that took the images that were used to produce this. I should point out the that the inherent ideas behind this aren’t mine – they are my very clever bosses. But I’m proud anyway, it took a lot of work and there is art in the details of successful remote sensing.

I should mention, I guess, that dry dipterocarp forest (aka indaing) is home to some threatened animal species and is, I am told, dissapearing. So having maps of it is probably important for conservation policy. It’s nice to be able to do things that actually matter in some way. Even if they are done imperfectly and they contribute in only a small way compared to the size of the big picture, it sooo beats selling things.