Monitoring of Agricultural Land Conversion with Copernicus Sentinel Sensors: Case Study of Gambella State (Ethiopia)

Agricultural production in Africa needs to expand considerably for food self-sufficiency to keep up with population growth and differentiating dietary needs. Expansion of agricultural cultivation is already ongoing and, in some regions, has led to controversy about the scale, manner and impact of land allotment policies. The recent introduction of the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-1 and -2 sensors has added global monitoring capacities in the 10-20 m spatial resolution domain. Sentinel data are available under a "full, free and open" license. Sentinel sensors combine Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR, Sentinel 1) and multi-spectral (Sentinel-2) observation capacities with a 6 day revisit (Sentinel 1A and 1B) and a 5 day revisit (Sentinel 2A and Sentinel 2B (Q2/2017)), respectively. We illustrate the use of Sentinel data for the delineation of large land development in Gambella State (Ethiopia), where we have been able to identify a total of 110,000 hectares of recent developments. We will discuss how we use the Google Earth Engine cloud computing environment to continue the monitoring of Gambella state and expand into other areas where land deals have been identified.

LEMOINE Guido;  REMBOLD Felix; 

2018-01-17

World Bank

JRC110040

978-0-8213-8591-3,   

https://www.conftool.com/landandpoverty2017/index.php/10-08-Lemoine-982_paper.pdf?page=downloadPaper&filename=10-08-Lemoine-982_paper.pdf&form_id=982&form_version=final,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC110040,