The AGRICAB project: developing increased earth observation capacity for better agriculture and forestry management in Africa

This paper gives an overview of the upcoming efforts and activities in the recently started AGRICAB project ‘A Framework for enhancing earth observation capacity for agriculture and forest management in Africa as a contribution to GEOSS’, which main focus is to integrate European and African research capacity and advances in the use of Earth observation technology for agriculture and forestry. One of the key challenges in the future is to enhance scientific and remote sensing capacity in Africa to enable African institutes to independently monitor and generate information on their natural resources to adequately support management and policy actions. Apart from the sustained provision of (derived) EO data, the project aims at a continued and better exploitation of and access to satellite data. Twinning partnerships between African and European institutes are being set up in order to integrate EO and predictive modeling in agriculture and forest management in different themes: yield forecasting for food crops, early warning and agricultural mapping of food crops, agricultural statistics, livestock and rangeland monitoring, and forest and forest fire monitoring. For more information: www.agricab.info and [email protected].