Turning pixels into insights: Leveraging the Cloud and Earth observations for monitoring change in Zambia

The pressures on global land are greater now than at any other time in human history. Rapidly increasing populations and rising levels of consumption are placing ever-larger demands on our natural capital. Current land use patterns in Sub-Saharan Africa to support these demands have led to degradation, desertification, deforestation, declining agricultural productivity, biodiversity loss while climate change issues exacerbate these challenges and pose further environmental and socio-economic challenges. Digital technology and Earth Observation (EO) are transforming the way countries can assess, monitor and plan the use of their natural resources, including monitoring deforestation and desertification. EO offers wide coverage, is faster than ground based methods and facilitates long-term monitoring of land coverage and utility. While EO cannot substitute the need for ground based monitoring, it provides an opportunity to complement these sources of information, in a timely and effective manner, enabling critical land use management decisions to be made, hence promoting sustainable use of the same resources.

Caption: Leveraging the Cloud and Earth observations for monitoring change in Zambia

RCMRD, through its SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa program, has been focused on strengthening national and institutional capacities to be able to adopt and adapt new technologies that can help in improving resource management to address varied development challenges. In February 2022, it conducted a one week training to stakeholders drawn from the University of Zambia, National Remote Sensing Center, Department of Survey and Lands, and Department of Forestry in Zambia, on the use of Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing resources. GEE for remote sensing applications is quickly becoming one of the most utilized tools in the scientific and decision-making community. GEE provides unparalleled access to petabytes of data for analysis through cloud computing technology. The aim of the training was to equip the stakeholders with knowledge and skills of addressing issues related to deforestation, degradation and change occurrences, knowing when and where they happen.

Caption:RCMRD conducted a one-week GEE training in Zambia

This training covered the GEE Code Editor, hands-on exercises on change detection, time series analysis, land cover classification, and accuracy assessment. By the end of this training, the participants were able to: Navigate the GEE interface to explore remote sensing datasets relevant to land monitoring; optimize the strength of GEE in providing multiple access to shared resources with GEE and those that can be brought into GEE as a shared resource, execute JavaScript commands to retrieve satellite data and process imagery for analysis, develop proxy indicators for monitoring losses in vegetation over periods of time; and access data processed remotely into local machines for further use and assessments should that be necessary.

Turning pixels into insights: Leveraging the Cloud and Earth observations for monitoring change in Zambia

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