SALDi & EMSAfrica Training Course: Remote Sensing Applications in South Africa with Focus on Land Degradation

The SPACES projects SALDi and EMS Africa conducted an Earth Observation training course at WITS Rural Facility, Acornhoek, South Africa, 04 – 08 July 2022
Group photo from the SALDi / EMS Africa Earth Observation training course @ WITS Rural Facility, South Africa
Group photo from the SALDi / EMS Africa Earth Observation training course @ WITS Rural Facility, South Africa
Image: Mona Saad 2022

From 4.-8. July 2022 the SALDi & EMS Africa Training Course took place at the WITS Rural Facility near Hoedspruit in the Limpopo Province in NE South Africa.

Five lecturers (Prof. C. Schmullius, Dr. C. Dubois, Dr. F. Thonfeld, K. Heckel, P. Renner) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU Jena) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as well as 16 early-career scientists (PhDs and postdocs) (see group photo) enjoyed learning together about Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 processing procedures, which were developed as part of the SPACES II SALDi and EMS Africa research projects. The 16 participants came from universities and research agencies from Egypt, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Highlights of the final day were the production of surface moisture and woody cover products by the participants and an introduction to the EMS-App for optical data processing as well as to the SALDi Data Cube. The Data Cube contains a full set of Sentinel-1 and -2 data and products as well as several Jupyter notebook applications and is openly available.