This application manual is the result of a two weeks tailor made advanced training course, conducted in the framework of the DevCoCast at the Faculty ITC of the University of Twente, in Enschede, The Netherlands in February 2011.
Over 30 participants from various African, Latin American and European Universities, (Space) Research and Training Centres and European – African International Collaboration Projects have participated in this course. Most participants have been attending previous workshops and other short training courses which have been conducted in the framework of the DevCoCast project in Africa, some in conjunction with AMESD, and Latin America. After having acquired a sound subject working knowledge by the participants, the main objective of this advanced course was to develop applications, demonstrating the use of the data disseminated via GEONETCast.
After an introductory chapter, describing the GEONETCast system and the role of the DevCoCast project, various chapters highlight applications developed by the participants during the course, using where possible in situ observations and linking these to the processing and analysis of various remote sensing images and derived products. Application fields covered range from vegetation, biomass and different types of agricultural assessments, natural habitat conservation, insect and pest monitoring, rainfall and evapotranspiration estimation, hot spot and fire detection, drought monitoring and even some marine applications are included. Study areas selected are from South America, Eastern and Southern Africa.
The overall objective of this manual is to demonstrate the advantage of using freely available data, disseminated via GEONETCast and to make available a set of exercises that can be used within the curricula of Institutes for Higher Education within various disciplines or by interested individuals.
The document is available at: https://filetransfer.itc.nl/pub/52n/gnc_devcocast_applications/description/devcocast_application_manual.pdf
The chapters describe the various (pre-) processing and analysis steps in a structured manner following a clearly described methodology for different application. Power point presentations are available to further underpin the described methodology and to illustrate the exercise outcome.
All related materials – the full manual, supporting power point presentations, but also the sample data sets for all exercises, ensuring minimum compressed file size have been prepared and can be downloaded from https://filetransfer.itc.nl/pub/52n/gnc_devcocast_applications/.
Although the exercises have been developed some time ago and currently the ILWIS software has been updated and the input data sources might have been changed, the exercise descriptions are still valid. In order to use the exercises according to the descriptions provided also the ILWIS 372 software is made available. The software utility can be downloaded from: https://filetransfer.itc.nl/pub/52n/gnc_devcocast_applications/ilwis372_software/
Copy the “ilwis372.zip” file to the root of your C:\ or D:\ drive and use an unzip utility -> extract here. On your C:\ or D:\ drive you should have a new folder “ilwis372”, When navigating to this folder, and right clicking with the mouse on the file “ilwis.exe”, you can create a shortcut to your desktop to start the application.
DevCoCast Advanced course participants / contributors to the Application manual.