10 avr. 2017 00:00

Nexus Seminar // Remote Sensing for Water Management in African Savanna (Kruger National Park)

Savannas are among Africa’s most productive landscapes – supporting livestock/crops and livelihoods – but experience frequent droughts, aggravated by climate change and other human-induced changes. To maintain ecosystem productivity without reaching the tipping points, while ensuring food security, we should rely on an integrated watershed management and monitoring. Uncertainties associated with management can be reduced by integrating timely and precise information of ecosystem dynamics (e.g. Earth Observation (EO) and open data sources, modelling) into decision-making processes.

Seminars

EO data (VIS/NIR/TIR) provided by new ESA Sentinels satellites allow us to map the water use/stress and vegetation distribution across African savannas, as well as to monitor seasonal and long-term temporal variations, to support rangeland management at different scales (farm-local to watershed-regional). TIGER Project 401, a joint initiative of UNU-FLORES and the University of Limpopo (South Africa), combines two different scientific approaches (Kc-FAO56 and two-source energy balance models), with different conceptual and operational capabilities and limitations, to monitor savanna water flux. The procedure was tested and validated over two experimental areas with different ecotones in Kruger National Park, and will allow for estimation of savanna evapotranspiration over larger areas across Africa.

Where and when

UNU-FLORES
Ammonstrasse 74
9th Floor
Dresden
Germany 10 April 2017

Lecturer

Dr. Ana Andreu Mendez (UNU-FLORES) Ana Andreu is a Research Assistant in the Systems and Flux Analysis considering Global Change Assessment Unit at UNU-FLORES. She contributes to the development of the Water-Soil-Waste Nexus Approach and leads the TIGER project “Remote Sensing of water use and water stress in African savanna ecosystem from local to regional scale: Implications for land productivity” in Europe. Before joining UNU-FLORES, Ana was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California in Berkele (USA), studying water dynamics over semi-arid ecosystems and modelling savanna-type rangelands. She received her Master of Science in Water and Sanitation Projects in International Cooperation from EOI in Sevilla, Spain, Master of Science in Environmental Hydraulics from University of Granada and UCO in Spain, and PhD in Biogeochemical Fluxes Dynamics and its Applications from University of Córdoba and IFAPA in Spain.

Nexus Seminar Series

UNU-FLORES in collaboration with the Faculty of Environmental Sciences of TU Dresden is excited to announce the Nexus Seminar Series. The joint seminar series, which launched in 2015, features lectures by senior scholars that highlight all dimensions of research on the Nexus Approach, ranging from hands-on implementation strategies to theoretical debates. The Nexus Seminars serve not only as a platform for scientific exchange and cooperation between UNU-FLORES and TU Dresden but also a medium for the partner institutions to discuss their research with a broader audience. Taking place once a month, each seminar is open to the public and held alternatingly at UNU-FLORES and TU Dresden.