Closing event of the AGRICAB project

Science plays a key role in understanding the dynamics of agricultural and forest resources. Remote sensing provides recurrent information on natural resources in various timescales and periods. A key challenge is to enhance scientific and remote sensing capacity in Africa to enable African institutes to independently monitor and generate information on agricultural and forest resources to adequately support management and policy actions.

AGRICAB aims to develop a framework for enhancing earth observation capacity to support agriculture and forestry management in Africa. The project aims at improving and sustaining capacity for data access, agrometeorological modeling, early warning, agricultural statistics, livestock monitoring and forest mapping. These components are developed through specific case studies in Senegal, Kenya, Tunisia, Mozambique, South Africa and Niger, leading to dedicated training actions capitalizing on the findings.

Together, the 17 project partners have organized more than 50 training workshops, used data from new European satellites and services (e.g. Copernicus), promoted open data sharing according to the principles agreed by the Group of Earth Observations, integrated software tools and models, set up satellite ground reception equipment and developed novel web services using Big Data techniques.

Innovative partnerships and collaborations developed through the project have led to:

• better informed agriculture policy making in Senegal, Kenya and Mozambique;
• cross-boundary coordination and study of groundwater use for irrigated crops in Tunisia and its neighbours;
• state-of-the-art South African research on tree cover and volumes mapping and managing fires;
• livestock modelling at global to local scales and developing related insurance products.

Information on workshops organised within the project, available software and tools, and data download is accessible from our dedicated Africa platform.

The Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) that coordinates the implementation of AGRICAB is organising the closing meeting of the project on 24 March 2015 in Antwerp (Belgium) to review the project's achievements and discuss the way forward.

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More information about the project:

Website: http://www.agricab.info  

Africa RS portal: http://rs.vito.be/africa