{"id":5608,"date":"2026-06-17T07:09:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T07:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/?p=5608"},"modified":"2026-06-19T07:25:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T07:25:32","slug":"icipe-researchers-get-hands-on-with-digital-earth-africas-earth-observation-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/icipe-researchers-get-hands-on-with-digital-earth-africas-earth-observation-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"icipe researchers get hands-on with Digital Earth Africa\u2019s Earth observation tools"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On 4 June 2026, researchers, scientists and technical staff at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) gathered at the institute\u2019s Nairobi campus for a hands-on introduction to Digital Earth Africa\u2019s platforms and data products. The session, marked one of the first formal capacity-building engagements between the two organisations since icipe assumed full operational management and long-term ownership of the programme in April 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">icipe has built decades of expertise in tropical ecology and pest research across Africa, and its geo-information unit already uses satellite and remote-sensing technologies to track invasive species, model climate risk and guide land management decisions. DE Africa\u2019s continental archive and open-access platforms extend that capacity significantly, offering real-time analysis at a scale that field surveys alone cannot do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The training introduced participants to DE Africa\u2019s two primary access platforms: the DE Africa Map, a browser-based tool for visualising continental datasets, and the Jupyter Sandbox, a cloud-computing environment for running analysis notebooks at scale. Participants worked through use cases directly relevant to the institute\u2019s mandate including monitoring crop health and vegetation phenology using Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery; tracking waterbody extent and wetland turbidity at sites including Lakes Baringo, Bogoria, Turkana and Naivasha; and detecting deforestation across sites such as the Maasai Mau Forest, where DE Africa\u2019s data captured significant vegetation loss in the Olenguruone area between 2013 and 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nairobi\u2019s rapid urban expansion provided another concrete example. Analysis using DE Africa\u2019s sandbox showed the city\u2019s built-up area growing from 570 km\u00b2 in 2017 to 590 km\u00b2 by 2021, data directly relevant to land-use planning and SDG 11 reporting. Surface temperature trend analysis covering the same period illustrated the thermal consequences of that expansion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The session demonstrated the breadth of DE Africa\u2019s continental services. Key products covered included:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Water Observations from Space (WOfS): DE Africa\u2019s first continental-scale product, mapping the presence, location and recurrence of water across the continent since the 1980s<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Coastlines Monitoring Service: providing free, interactive access to annual shoreline positions, rates of change and erosion hotspots; Kenya\u2019s data shows 96 km of retreating and 212 km of advancing shoreline<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Cropland Extent Map, GeoMAD and Fractional Cover: analysis-ready products supporting agriculture, food security and land degradation monitoring<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Waterbodies Monitoring Service: enabling time-series tracking of large, remote and seasonally variable water bodies across the continent<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In addition, crosscutting applications including ship detection with radar data, landcover classification and surface mining screening highlighted the platform\u2019s versatility beyond the thematic areas icipe\u2019s teams work in most directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For icipe, an institution whose work spans insect ecology, agricultural resilience and environmental health across the tropics, DE Africa\u2019s data infrastructure offers a new layer of analysis. In as much as satellite observations cannot replace fieldwork, they can reach the places field teams cannot such as tracking a lake\u2019s turbidity across three decades, mapping crop stress across a region overnight, or flagging deforestation before ground-level monitoring catches it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This session was a first step in building that capacity systematically across the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 4 June 2026, researchers, scientists and technical staff at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) gathered at the institute\u2019s Nairobi campus for a hands-on introduction to Digital Earth Africa\u2019s platforms and data products. The session, marked one of the first formal capacity-building engagements between the two organisations since icipe assumed full [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5609,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"audience":[],"class_list":["post-5608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capacity-development"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5608"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5611,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5608\/revisions\/5611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5608"},{"taxonomy":"audience","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/audience?post=5608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}