AfriCultuReS

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 774652.

AfriCultuReS – Enhancing Food Safety in AFRIcan AgriCULTUral Systems with the Support of Remote sensing –  aims to design, implement, and demonstrate an integrated agricultural monitoring and early warning system that will support decision-making in the field of food safety.

AfriCultuReS will deliver a broad range of climate, production, biophysical, and economic information for various regions in Africa. AfriCultuReS will apply geospatial science to sustainable agricultural development, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation in Africa.

Representation of African agricultural systems

With support from the Group of Earth Observation (GEO) Secretariat, AfriCultuReS will involve all key players from AfriGEOSS, GEOGLAM, SIGMA, ARTEMIS, African Drought Observatory and other initiatives, as well as partners representing the diversity of African agricultural systems, in an effort to push forward the services provided by current systems, with innovative merging of data from multiple sources (EO, on the ground, citizen-based crowdsourcing, climate and weather services, and crop models) vertically. Crop yield and biomass prediction models will be enhanced through the merging of EO data and climate models, emphasizing the use of complementary sensors from the EU Sentinel satellite constellation.

Enhanced decision-making process and risk assessment

Geospatial products will be combined in a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) to enhance decision-making and risk assessment. The geo component of the DSS will comply with the GEO interoperability standards, allowing its integration with the current services of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure.

The African partners and collaborating networks will be essential for local training and promoting further use of the resulting tools. Social innovation will be used to increase the number of stakeholders involved and to boost the flow of information as simply as possible. The end goal will be to produce a web tool that will support early detection decision-making for the stakeholders in African food production.