The GEO Highlights 2017-2018 Report - published by Group on Earth Observations (GEO) - showcases some exemplary use-cases gathered from across GEO’s Work Programme activities, and represents contributions from among the 100 GEO member countries and more than 120 partners supporting GEO’s mission.

Africa Regional Data Cube

The initiative lays groundwork for first continental-scale access to analysis ready data (ARD).

Launched in May 2018, Africa Regional Data Cube is a tool that harnesses the latest Earth observation and satellite technology to help Kenya, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Tanzania address food security, as well as issues relating to agriculture, deforestation, and water access.

GEO is now working with its partners to scale up this project to the whole of Africa, to help improve understanding of Africa’s changing landscape, providing much-needed insights, knowledge and ARD for more informed, strategic and inclusive decision-making across the continent.

Kenya’s first national crop monitor

The project aims to strengthen food security.

In 2018, Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, Livestock and Fisheries issued the country’s first national crop monitor, with support from NASA SERVIR, Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), and GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM).

GEO-CRADLE

The Initiative focuses on four key thematic areas: adaptation to climate change, improved food security and water extremes management, access to raw materials, and access to energy.

GEO-CRADLE promotes the sustainable and continuous uptake and exploitation of Earth observation services and data in North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, and the implementation of GEOSS and Copernicus in response to regional needs.

Recently, GEO-CRADLE has launched Regional Tools for Soil Spectroscopy and climate data access.

A Regional Soil Spectral Library (SSL) for North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans has been developed as part of the GEO-CRADLE pilot project ‘Improved Food Security - Water Extremes Management’. Healthy soils provide essential services such as food production, prevention of land degradation, water quality, and they act as carbon sinks. Monitoring of soil quality and soil properties is necessary to ensure these benefits are realized. One of the most important technologies used to monitor soils is soil spectroscopy, which uses the spectral information of soil samples to derive their properties, including soil degradation, moisture content, chemistry composition, pedogenesis, geochemistry, physics, microbiology, mineralogy, mining and more. The Regional Soil Spectral Library enables researchers and decision makers to explore a regional soil spectral dataset that contains metadata on the soils sampled, their key properties, and their spectral signature.

As part of the GEO-CRADLE ‘Adaptation to Climate Change’ pilot project, the Data Extraction Application for Regional Climate (DEAR-Clima) was developed. DEARClima is an interactive web application tool that visualizes and provides time series of essential climate variables and climate indices based on high horizontal resolution Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) research programme. Open, reliable and user friendly access to future climate change data from high resolution RCM projections is essential to support decision makers, stakeholders, intermediary users and end-users for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Download the GEO Highlights 2017-2018 Report and read more featuring global stories from the GEO community on the use of Earth Observation data.