Land use monitoring by remote sensing in tropical forest areas in support of the Kyoto Protocol: the case of French Guiana

International audience; The new SPOT/Envisat direct receiving station (DRS) operating in Cayenne in the framework of the SEAS-Guyane project was used to produce a global cloudless 15 SPOT mosaic over French Guiana for the year 2006. This mosaic was used to perform a land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) inventory in the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. Nearly 17 000 sample points were laid down on the SPOT mosaic with a stratified sampling design. The land use at each sample point was determined by visual interpretation of the corresponding SPOT image in 2006 and the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image from the Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) in 1990. Statistics for the period 19902006 were computed and integrated in the first voluntary Kyoto inventory.