Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AfriCultuReS (Enhancing Food Security in AFRIcan AgriCULTUral Systems with the Support of REmote Sensing)
Teaser
AfriCultuReS – Enhancing Food Security in AFRIcan AgriCULTUral Systems with the Support of REmote Sensing - aims to design, implement and demonstrate an integrated agricultural monitoring and early warning system that will support decision making in the field of food...
Summary
AfriCultuReS – Enhancing Food Security in AFRIcan AgriCULTUral Systems with the Support of REmote Sensing - aims to design, implement and demonstrate an integrated agricultural monitoring and early warning system that will support decision making in the field of food security. AfriCultuReS will deliver a broad range of climatic, production, biophysical and economic information, for various regions in Africa. AfriCultuReS will apply geospatial science to sustainable agricultural development, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation in Africa.
AfriCultuReS will push forward the services provided by current systems, with innovative fusion of multi-source data; EO, in-situ, crowdsourced, climate services and weather, crop models. Crop yield and biomass prediction models will be enhanced through the fusion of EO data and climate models, emphasizing the use of the complementary sensors of the EU Sentinels constellation. Geospatial products will be combined in a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) to enrich decision making and risk assessment.
AfriCultuReS will deliver the following services:
o Climate: to improve climate predictions, seasonal climate early warning and climate adaptation advice
o Crops: to improve crop condition monitoring and yield forecasts
o Droughts: to improve drought early warning and forecasts
o Land: to provide advice on avoiding land degradation and to improve soil condition assessment
o Livestock: to improve grazing and rangeland monitoring, browsing capacity assessment and identification of available water sources for livestock
o Water: to improve monitoring of water availability and productivity, crop water requirements assessment and soil moisture monitoring
o Weather: to improve (local) weather forecasts and extreme weather early warning
Services will mainly focus on maize, wheat, potatoes, sorghum, cassava, millet, rice and sugarcane. Grassland for livestock farming will also be included in the portfolio and room is made for crops that are locally relevant.
AfriCultuReS is complementary to GEOGLAM by providing national scale crop monitoring. AfriCultuReS will also contribute to AfriGEO and EuroGEO as well as to the GMES & Africa programme. At the other end of the scale AfriCultuReS has an overlap with and is complementary to the Geodata for Agriculture and Water Facility (G4AW), Dutch contribution to GEO, which focuses on smallholders.
AfriCultuReS has a direct relation with the TWIGA H2020 initiative on innovation and improvement of in situ networks on water, weather, climate and disasters in Africa.
AfriCultuReS contributes mainly to SDG 2 ‘Zero Hunger’, SDG 1 ‘End Poverty’ and SDG 6 ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’. With respect to the Sendai Framework, AfriCultuReS addresses the key aspects of reducing the impact of disasters, while reducing financial risk for the main stakeholders through cooperation with the financial sector.
At the end AfriCultuReS aims at bringing solutions to the market to ensure its sustainability, in this regard AfriCultuReS is teaming up with potential clients. If solutions are created not only for, but also with clients, market readiness can be achieved quicker and more easily.
Work performed
The reporting period M1-M18 falls within the Scoping, Framework Analysis, Requirements Definition and Services Desing to be delivered by AfriCultuReS. The work carried out and results achieved include:
o Project Coordination
- Setting in place contract matters and distribution of advance payment funds
- Early preparation and signature of the consortium Agreement
- Establish the internal management tools (REDMINE, shared repository) and the Project Management Plan.
- Definition of the initial plan governing data management in compliance with the H2020 ORDP
- Steer work among partners. Follow up deliverables progress.
- Establishment of the Project Board which has remotely met in a monthly basis.
- Project Progress Reporting (this document)
o Scientific and Technical coordination
- Definition of the scope of the project, agreement on definitions of the most important concepts, geographical scope, agricultural systems that are covered
- Establishment of the Scientific and Technical Coordination Board of the project. Scientific and Technical Coordination Board, three meetings have been held aiming at coordination between the Service Providers, implementing science, and the technical IT team
- Nomination of Advisory and Users Boards and definition of the TOR ruling their participation in the project
o Identification and priorization of short and long-term risks associated with agricultural production in Africa
o Definition of users’ requirements. This task has two major, unscheduled, inputs:
i) Users Exercise, by African participant entities, providing insights about food production in their respective countries, available data sources already in place.
ii) National Users Workshops led by African participants, aiming at gathering requirements and characteristics of agro systems, major crops and livestock, risks, state of the art on the use of geo-technologies.
o Definition of the service portfolio on the basis of risks analysis, identified agricultural systems, scope of the project and the users’ requirements. Seven services have been defined on Climate, Crops, Droughts, Land, Livestock, Water and Weather
o Analysis of enabling technologies and state-of-the art of current and future EO missions and programmes suitable for the implementation of the project’s pool of services
- Analysis of current and future EO missions and identification of most suitable sensors to be used by AfriCultuReS product portfolio.
- Analysis of free open source SW candidate tools for the implementation of the project’s back-end (storage, processing) and front-end (data exploitation, GIS environment, dashboard for data analysis and decision making
o Definition of the production chain required for the delivery of services, selection of primary data inputs (EO and no-EO) as well as definition of ancillary data required for training and validation.
- Design of the EO production chain needed to feed the platform of services, the crop models and to produce the products
- Analysis of EO data focusing on provisioning pan-African and National scale products
- Definition of processes for non-EO data identification and collection and its appropriate format
- Identification of the open access data that will be integrated to help in quantifying and qualifying the aspects of food production and food security for Africa
o Definition of the Data Storage Requirements and data Server development
o Definition of the functions and operation of the IT platform, taking into account the user requirement and design of the system architecture and integration framework
o Design of the dissemination and communication plan and execution of and communication actions
- Define the communication and dissemination plan
- Establish visual identity
- Design and launch of the website
- Set up of social media accounts
- Press releases
- Project brochures
- Marketing material
o Analysis of current programmes to which AfriCultuReS can serve in view of future
Final results
Not applicable for this progress reporting period at M18
Website & more info
More info: http://www.africultures.eu.