This course will be held at the Faculty of Science, University of Chouaib Doukalla, Route Ben Maachou, 24000, El Jadida, Morocco. Classroom to be determined at a later date. Participants will receive an email confirmation.

MoFuSS: Modeling Fuelwood Savings Scenarios is a GIS-based open-source freeware developed to evaluate potential impacts of residential firewood use over the landscape. Users have different levels of interaction, from querying available results in a mapserver to uploading their own maps and parameters and ultimately affect underlying geoprocessing operations. MoFuSS is developed and supported by the Environmental Geography Research Center (CIGA) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in collaboration with the US Center of the Stockholm Environment Institute. The first version of MoFuSS (version 1.0) was developed between September 2011 and April 2015 with funding from Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, Overlook International Foundation, ClimateWorks and UNAM’s PAPIIT.
We developed MoFuSS with the underlying objective of producing estimates of non-renewable biomass (NRB) at landscape level while allowing users to input the best available data for their area of interest, including project-specific maps and parameters. MoFuSS was developed thinking in a wide range of users from academics and practitioners, to students and NGOs. Used correctly, it should help these stakeholders to: a) get more consistent estimates of fuelwood-related carbon savings within their interest areas, and b) plan sound and cost-effective intervention projects. MoFuSS consists of several “scripts” or list of commands that are executed by freely available computer programs and packages (e.g. DINAMICA EGO, R, FFmpeg, LaTeX, GoogleEarth). Before the course, all scripts will be available for download along with training datasets for Mexico, Central America, Kenya and India (Karnataka). Training datasets vary in size depending on the region and are comprised of spatial raster and vector data and other non-spatial tabular datasets.
MoFuSS is a dynamic model that simulates the effects of fuelwood harvesting on vegetation, accounting for savings in non-renewable woody biomass from reduced consumption due to an external intervention, such as an improved cookstove (ICS) project. Under the assumptions that the demand for fuelwood and its spatial distribution are known, the core questions that the tool addresses are: 1) the quantity of fuelwood harvested at a given location within a specific time frame; 2) the response of vegetation measured by aboveground biomass (AGB) stock and growth rates; 3) changes in harvest and response over time induced by reduced fuelwood demand as a result of ICS adoption or fuel switching. One salient feature of MoFuSS is the modeling of expected land clearing or forest gain events in the near future based on past observations. However, fuelwood extraction and land clearing are the only drivers of wood removals that are modeled. In real cases, vegetation can react differently under the influence of other drivers like extensive grazing or altered fire regimes. Another key feature of MoFuSS is the explicit management of uncertainty. Many parameters such as woody biomass growth are allowed to vary based on probability distributions and measures of dispersion. Including this variability helps users to cope with uncertainty in forest dynamics expected to occur within the study area following different biophysical and management conditions.