Landsat Pathfinder tropical forest information management system

A Tropical Forest Information Management System_(TFIMS) has been designed to fulfill the needs of HTFIP in such a way that it tracks all aspects of the generation and analysis of the raw satellite data and the derived deforestation dataset. The system is broken down into four components: satellite image selection, processing, data management and archive management. However, as we began to think of how the TFIMS could also be used to make the data readily accessible to all user communities we realized that the initial system was too project oriented and could only be accessed locally. The new system needed development in the areas of data ingest and storage, while at the same time being implemented on a server environment with a network interface accessible via Internet. This paper summarizes the overall design of the existing prototype (version 0) information management system and then presents the design of the new system (version 1). The development of version 1 of the TFIMS is ongoing. There are no current plans for a gradual transition from version 0 to version 1 because the significant changes are in how the data within the HTFIP will be made accessible to the extended community of scientists, policy makers, educators, and students and not in the functionality of the basic system.