Remote Sensing of Water Use and Water Stress in African Savanna Ecosystem from Local to Regional Scale
The workshop will be held at the University of Limpopo, Wednesday 20th to Friday 22nd September, 2017.
Drought periods and erratic rainfall patterns across large parts of Africa result in water-limited environments like savannas, highly sensitive to land management practices and changes in climate. Over the Southern part of the continent, savannas are key productive landscapes supporting livestock, crops and rural livelihoods. Monitoring water use and the natural vegetation stress over these semi-arid complex ecosystems can support rangeland management, to maintain long-term productivity. Quantifying water (energy) fluxes requires an efficient and sound monitoring of the state variables driving their evolution, the external conditions influencing them, and the measurement of the fluxes. Remote sensing provides a unique perspective to approach these exchanges, with sensors, analytical tools and models continuously evolving and providing new possibilities to address a more complete space-time description of these land-atmosphere processes.
This workshop aims to present the current state of art On Remote Sensing for African Savannas Water Use and Stress, with a practical (Hands on training) approach, discussing the perspectives for the use of earth observation technology on the estimation of water and energy fluxes, with a special focus on modelling semiarid complex natural systems evapotranspiration.
This action is part of the TIGER project 401, within the TIGER Initiative framework, funded by the European Space Agency, and support by the United Nations University, the University of Limpopo and the University of Western Cape.
For the workshop, the TIGER Savanna Tool Handbook will be used (and provided).
More information about the free workshop and the application form are available here. The deadline for applications is 10 September 2017.
