Pontus Olofsson of NASA MSFC’s Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) was awarded a three-year grant as principal investigator from the NASA SERVIR program to support the SERVIR West Africa Hub. The selected proposal, titled "Continued support for estimation and monitoring of land change and forest degradation in West Africa," aims to enhance local decision-makers' ability to curb and mitigate environmentally destructive processes such as deforestation and forest degradation. Historically, environmental remote sensing of such processes has been hampered in West Africa because of a lack of data. New paradigms in remote sensing science based on time series analysis have been particularly problematic to implement in the region because of an extremely low density of historical Landsat data. The proposed project will employ a multi-tier system that uses Landsat, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2 data but adapts to the amount of data available. The project also emphasizes in-region stakeholder engagement to enhance the capacity for satellite-based monitoring.
