Agricultural scientists across the globe including Uganda are focusing on having a central focus for governing bodies in Africa to secure the necessary food sources for the nationals to access safe and nutritious food to meet the dietary requirements.

Experts estimate that the current food production will need to double by the year 2050 to meet the future growing population food demand.

The United Nations agenda for sustainable development goal 2 calls on stakeholders to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

As such scientists majoring in the area of satellite imagery think it is important to use weather mapping to improve Africa’s food crop production as well as animal husbandry including poultry and fish breeding.

The current cropland maps are either inaccurate, have too uneven spatial resolutions or are not updated regularly.

This therefore called African scientists to see to it that the team up with their colleagues in Australia who are already using Digital Earth Technology by bringing it closer to the African Continent to help in space based climate and weather predictions especially to help the farming communities

Background

The Digital Earth Africa platform was established three years ago majorly for cropland mapping for purposes of assisting farmers in addressing food insecurity challenges.

This is done by providing precise and accurate cropland mapping by using space maps about watering intensities, crop types and crop productivity in African farm lands.

These service provides accurate high resolutions and regular updated cropland map areas and data sets for the continent to address gaps in the current crop monitoring.

In a publication by experts working for the European commission, they define Digital Earth as a concept of an interactive digital replica of the entire planet that can facilitate a shared understanding of the multiple relationship between the physical and natural environment society.

They state that for this to work well it must be accessible globally from multiple platforms such as mobile tablets and computers where information is displayed and easily understood by multiple audience such as scientists, policy makers and other beneficiaries.

This means the data must be updated with the existing ones coming from the space based sensors.

It must be able to focus on change from the past to present and future by including not just data but also outcomes of models and replications to enable a wider understanding of the consequences of human action on the environment.

It must be a tool for scientific discovery and education including social interaction.

For the case of Africa the current projects are focusing on farming for food security and this is done by mapping farm fields to ascertain the soil fertility, space based weather forecasts for appropriate planting to obtain good yields including use of appropriate water by farmers and below are the details.

Digital Earth Africa activity implementation  

The Programme officer for Technology and Innovations at ASARECA Joshua Okonya explaining the background of application of Digital Earth Africa (DE) Technology in helping the farmer communities notes that there are climate variances arising from climate change effects which is affecting food security.

“Weather conditions are now not conducive for farmers to produce appropriate food and livestock for nutrition. Apparently there are erratic floods and prolonged drought occurrence as a result of climate change. This is the reason Geo scientists are coming up with the idea of monitoring the weather conditions using space science to help solve these challenges,” he noted.

This is a one year pilot project with funding worth 500,000 Australian Dollars from the Australian government and the team is working jointly with scientists from Australian Centre for International Agriculture and Research who are already using the technology to help their farmers achieve improved yields.

Once the project is successful the team will still corporate on a five year project about the same which is in the offing.

At the moment Geo scientists and private stakeholders are being sensitised about the technology and they will intern engage agricultural extension service providers who will reach out to the farmers through sensitization on community radios and sms messages on their phones.

What scientists have so far done using the technology to help communities in Africa?

Dr Kenneth Mubea working with Digital Earth Africa as capacity development lead specialist explained that scientists secured a server and computers with 24 hour enabled internet connectivity to host the regional mapping center in Pretoria, South Africa.

Much of the data collected is about farmer water usage on their farms, soil fertility and appropriate weather for farmers to manage their crop farming.

The data access is free of charge and it is just a matter of logging on the website digitalearthafrica.org and one will find what he or she is looking for.

He notes that the vision of DE Africa is to provide, routine reliable and appropriate service using Earth observation to deliver decision by policy makers, scientists, the private sector and civil society to address social, environmental and economic changes on the continent’s development in as far as its ecosystem is concerned,

The focus areas are agriculture and food security, water resources and food risks, land degradation, urbanisation and coastal erosion among others. 

“Digital Earth Africa is helping provide the data that is required and with the various partnerships we engaged including African governments we are going to succeed. We have so far deployed the technology in 55 countries in Africa so that we leave no one behind,” Dr Mubea noted.

How the technology can be used

What is unique is that a Geo scientist can apply the technology by remote observation in a farmer field to ascertain if the yields are good or not and advice the farmer accordingly.

The scientist is also able to assess the topography of specific land to establish if fertile land for farming is or not. Incas the drought conditions are prolonged in such and area then the farmers will be advised to engage in other activities such as cattle rearing by providing hay and water for the animal survival.

The target is to empower scientists in Universities to engage in imagery mapping which can be uploaded on the space server for stakeholders to access

So far 25 data publications have been uploaded from scientists in Ghana, Tanzania and Zanzibar about mangroves

In Mozambique and Zambia, the scientists have teamed up with experts in Food and Agriculture Organisation to help farmers with information about weather forecasts and land vegetation to address the issue of food security using Digital Earth Africa space server.

DE Africa Services and Tools

Dr Mubea goes further to explain that Cropland map water observations from space help to monitor water extent over time.

This is done using GeoMAD which is a set of data service that conduces annual worth satellite imagery in its station in South Africa for farmer use. Other condensed data are about land use and vegetation among others.

The information will be accessed through the web links and other tools where data analysis is done using Sandabox using the web link https//sandbox.dif=gitaleath.Africa

Mapping impact

So far 25 case studies have been published in activities that took place in Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, Zanzibar, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger and Uganda with stakeholders including government’s agencies, academia and agricultural research institutes.

Explaining what has so far happened in Zambia, Dr Mubea explained that the activity was about food security partnerships where experts used the technology to analyse cropland to ascertain future innovations in the farming system.

 The project run from March 2002 August 2022 where scientists collected data to predict crop yields on a national scale and results are yet to be announced.

Further projects in Rwanda and Mozambique in partnership with Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is focussing on use of EO for semi-automatic land cover mapping including identification of field boundaries.

This is targeting National Statistics offices in the two countries as a means to provide accurate data to its clients including farmers.

What has been done in Uganda?

According to Dr Mubea five years ago his team engaged Wanyange Girls Secondary School in Eastern Uganda by constructing a weather station at the school compound.

Students are taken through on how to predict weather for appropriate forecast through their geography teachers.

Once the students are home they able to help their parents who are farmers by predicting the weather pattern in order to follow the right planting season to acquire appropriate yields.

Measuring crop health

Currently DE Africa in the launched project is collaborating with Scientists the National Agricultural Research Laboratories (NaRL) in Kawanda climate change unit to study the banana plantations under trial in Nabweru, Wakiso district.

According to Dr Evelyn Kobutungi, the head of Climate Change Unit at the Institute, scientists conducting banana trials will be able to use GIS instruments to monitor the growth of the banana plantation under trial through remote sensing.

This way the will be able to see if the plants are green or not to achieve the required yield.

They will also be able notice if the plantation if infested with pests such as nematodes and diseases such as bacterial wilt, black sigatoga or Fuzarium wilt causing yield loss.

This kind of observation will inform agricultural policy makers to support the UN sustainable agenda on agriculture.

The scientists will be able to forecast the vegetation at Nabweru using Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous factors

SARIMAX is used by Geo scientists in data that have seasonal cycles and this makes scientists to know about the variation of the vegetation in a particular area.

The team at Nabweru will also conduct crop mapping to obtain agricultural statistics by developing prototype crop mapping workflows which must be user friendly.

The data generated by all countries in their various projects will be stores in cloud form in the EO server for easy access.

In order for the countries to be at par online meetings will be conducted for them to compare notes in order to move at the same pace.