WEBINAR: NASA-Harvest Food Security and Agriculture Program

11 February 2021. NASA-Harvest Food Security and Agriculture Program: Sowing Seeds of Food Security in Africa.

Satellite Earth Observation (EO) availability, rapid developments in methodology to archive and process them through cloud services, and advanced computational capabilities, continue to generate new opportunities for providing accurate, reliable, and timely information for decision-makers across multiple cropping systems. 

Currently, systems and tools that leverage open-access EO and provide actionable early warning information products exist. Some have already been employed by early adopters and are currently operational in select national monitoring programs. 

Despite these capabilities, many governments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) still rely on traditional monitoring systems, which mainly rely on sparse and long latency in situ reports with little to no integration of EO. 

This talk gives an overview of the NASA Harvest Program and the work under its Africa program. And provide an overview of open-access operational agricultural monitoring systems that provide the best-available open-access EO data that countries can readily take advantage of, adapt, adopt, and leverage to augment national systems and make significant leaps in their monitoring programs. 

In the webinar, Dr. Catherine Nakalembe described the data accessible in these systems and show typical outputs as well as how these can and have integrated into reporting and decision-making, using examples from East Africa.