Lake Malawi National Park, a World Natural Heritage site, has a resource use program that protects biodiversity and enables local people to use fisheries and forest resources for their livelihood. This initiative to balance forest conservation and utilization in Africa, where firewood and charcoal production cause deforestation and degradation, is innovative but faces several challenges. One of them is that the amount of forest resources production and consumption by local people are not known, and thus its sustainability is uncertain. To address this issue, we estimated the annual production of the dead wood that the national park allows local people to collect as firewood through field surveys and satellite image analysis.
Thirty circular plots with a radius of 12 m were established in the national park forest. Community-based participatory research was conducted from March 2023 to March 2024, weighing the dead wood in the plots every 2-3 weeks. The location of the center point of the research plots was positioned by network RTK-GNSS. We report the results of estimating the annual production of deadwood in the national park by combining multispectral image data taken by the Pleiades satellite, with ground data on deadwood production and above-ground biomass.