TMT Senegal 2023 2024

ITC-WRS and eLEAF B.V. conducted a series of tailor-made training (TMT) for the Center of Ecological Monitoring (Centre de Suivi Ecologique, CSE) in Dakar, Senegal. The TMT was funded by the Dutch Orange Knowledge Programme (OKP).

The training covered priority themes for Senegal: (i) Water (ii) Climate & Environment through long-term impact goals:

1. Water efficiency in agriculture increased (Water)
2. Earth-observation-based environment monitoring techniques improved (Climate & Environment)
3. Early warning and monitoring systems for disasters (bushfires, floods, droughts, oil spills) implemented (Climate & Environment)

Part 1: Python basics

The main request of CSE was to familiarize staff members with Python programming language for GIS and EO image processing. As such, the pre-training part in December 2023 focused on Miniconda installation and common packages for NetCDF (xarray), GeoTiff (rasterio) and shape file (geopandas) operations, along with the JupyterLab for interactive coding and visualization. The icing on the cake was the application programming interface (API) data access of Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (CDSE) through openEO.

Part 2: WaPOR

The second part of the training was delivered by eLEAF and focused on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Water Productivity Open-access portal (WaPOR) data usage for Crop Water Productivity (CWP) computations and Irrigation Performance Assessment (IPA) in the Senegal River delta. In addition, a whole-country drought assessment with the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was conducted. Participants presented their case study results to the guests from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Part 3: Python for EO

The final part of the training was devoted to Python applications for Earth Observation data. This part carried on with the Senegal River delta study area for automated parcel delineation (image segmentation with scikit-image), land surface phenology metrics extraction and object-based crop type mapping. The topic of water quality (chlorophyll content and turbidity) and water pollution with oil spills was delivered by Suhyb Salama online. On the final day, a FastFlood App developed by Bastian van den Bout and ITC-AES colleagues was showcased.

Tailor Made Training material

The course materials and Python notebooks are hosted by the ITC educational platform (Moodle learning management system) under TMT Senegal.

Contact persons

dr. E. Prikaziuk

Project leader

Global impact

Water management

Many of the world’s major environmental concerns have to do with water. Potable water is getting increasingly scarce, which makes it a valuable resource to be managed wisely. Extreme weather causes excessive flooding which can often be prevented with proper by interventions. Pollution of valuable water resources and the status of precious wetlands deserve close monitoring.

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