Remote sensing for resources development and environmental management: Remote sensing for resources development and environmental management

Damen, M. C. J.

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Multivolume work

Persistent identifier:: 856342815

Title:: Remote sensing for resources development and environmental management

Sub title:: proceedings of the 7th international Symposium, Enschede, 25 - 29 August 1986

Year of publication:: 1986

Place of publication:: Rotterdam; Boston

Publisher of the original:: A. A. Balkema

Identifier (digital):: 856342815

Language:: English

Additional Notes:: Volume 1-3 erschienen von 1986-1988

Editor:: Damen, M. C. J.

Document type:: Multivolume work

Volume

Persistent identifier:: 856343064

Title:: Remote sensing for resources development and environmental management

Sub title:: proceedings of the 7th international Symposium, Enschede, 25 - 29 August 1986

Scope:: XV, 547 Seiten

Year of publication:: 1986

Place of publication:: Rotterdam; Boston

Publisher of the original:: A. A. Balkema

Identifier (digital):: 856343064

Illustration:: Illustrationen, Diagramme

Signature of the source:: ZS 312(26,7,1)

Language:: English

Usage licence:: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Editor:: Damen, M. C. J.

Publisher of the digital copy:: Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover

Place of publication of the digital copy:: Hannover

Year of publication of the original:: 2016

Document type:: Volume

Collection:: Earth sciences

Chapter

Title:: 4 Renewable resources in rural areas: Vegetation, forestry, agriculture, soil survey, land and water use. Chairman: J. Besenicar, Liaisons: M. Molenaar, Th. A. de Boer

Document type:: Multivolume work

Structure type:: Chapter

Chapter

Title:: Contribution of remote sensing to food security and early warning systems in drought affected countries in Africa. Abdishakour A. Gulaid

Document type:: Multivolume work

Structure type:: Chapter

vork and Symposium on Remote Sensing for Resources Development and Environmental Management / Enschede / August 1986 jld replace presently at scales nge. This stive. In tion and ted in the of the many e, and can rk Contribution of remote sensing to food security and early warning systems in drought affected countries in Africa Abdishakour A.Gulaid Department of Photogrammetry and Cartography, Technical University of Berlin, FR Germany ovides an e processes egional rtant for ontribute future -use and for Use cal Survey on DC : ABSTRACT: As a result of the disastrous drought that affected many countries in the Sahel Zone in 1973/74, the international community has been looking for means of obtaining immediate and reliable information on the potential causes of this terrible danger that threatens millions of human and animal lives. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for example, has established an early warning system for predicting food shortages in many developing countries. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) installed a global environmental monitoring programme (GEMS). Many developing countries have set up their own food security and early warning systems with the help of multilateral or bilateral technical cooperation projects. The common aim of these programmes is the collection, processing and analysis of relevant data with the help of one or several methods, and the subsequent presentation of the derived information to the planners and decision-makers in order to take appropriate measures in time. This paper assesses the role of remote sensing in the existing and the future food security programmes and early warning systems in developing countries with particular emphasis on the drought affected countries in Africa. chapsplan- eningen: ent Plan rinter. bo 1986. bi area. hort study s of the roject, Agriculture. ure. ess. y and region. sis. London Institute landscape leningen : i^jthe Session ) Governing i vironmental 1 INTRODUCTION The immediate consequences of the disastrous drought in 1973/74 were water shortage, a drastic decline in crop and livestock production, the loss of hundreds of thousands of human and animal lives, and the destruction of the ecological balance that caused the encroachment of the desert with an unprecedented acceleration. In order to overcome these problems, various programmes were launched at the international, regional and national levels. Some of these programmes, such as the evacuation and the immediate supply of relief aid to the affected population, were short-term; others were mid-term or long-term such as the food security programmes and the rehabilitation measures, namely, the reforestation and the soil conservation programmes. The main objective of food security programmes is to ensure the population of a country with a certain minimum amount of food per capita. One instrument for the food security is the early warning system, whose task is the acquisition of reliable information on the situation of the available food supply and demand in the country, so as to increase its preparedness to better meet the eventual food shortages. The information needs to be collected on various interactive factors such as price policy, weather, soil, and the type of technology available, which affect production of food both from crops and livestock. The type of information and the methods of collecting it vary widely. The discussion in this paper will be confined to the type of information that could be derived by means of remote sensing methods and relevant to this topic. Remote sensing from aircraft has been used since the 1930's, however its broad applications increased with the industrial development of aircraft technology and photographical materials after the Second World War. The introduction of colour and infrared-colour film, has made the monitoring of crop conditions and identification of insect pests and crop diseases possible. Aerial photography, as is known, is today an important base for any major natural resource survey project, specially in developing countries where the available relevant maps are usually not updated. The improvement in the remote sensing technology in respect of hardware and software in the last decade and the availability of multisensoral (MSS, TM, SPOT, METEOSAT, NOAA, etc.) and multitemporal data offers the user today a wider choice to acquire the information needed. Through the launching of the first Earth Observational Satellites, LANDSAT 1-3 in the 1970's, the remote sensing user community turned to this new source of image data in order to derive information according to their needs. Experiments using LANDSAT Multispectral Scanner (MSS) images for land use and resource management among others started. In 1974 The National Space Agency (NASA), the US Department of Agriculture, (USDA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initiated the Large Crop Iventory Experiment (LACIE), a LANDSAT- image based programme correlated with meteorological information, to survey wheat production among the world's largest producers (Macdonald,Hall 1978). Though the technology applied was relatively sophisticated at that time and could hardly be transfered to developing countries, the experience collected in this pilot project was valuable and encouraging. Despite certain limitations such as the spatial resolution of the LANDSAT images, which caused user reservations at the beginning, the research and application of this type of data in renewable resources such as hydrology, agriculture and forestry has increased worldwide. This became useful for many developing countries in providing a range of thematic maps in the scale of 1:250.000 and smaller. The LANDSAT series continued with the launching of LANDSAT 4 in 1982 and LANDSAT 5 in 1985. The Thematic Mapper data of these two satellites have shown a major improvement in the spatial resolution, particularly in agricultural and vegetation covered areas. The disadvantage of the LANDSAT TM is the bulk of data that should be processed and the eventual costs. Today the user community is eager to see the preliminary results of the first images of SPOT that was launched in February 1986. Besides the expected 10-20 m ground resolution, the introduction of stereoscopic coverage is surely a major achievement for various fields of application such as the topographic and geological mapping. Besides the earth resource observation satellites, there is the other group of satellites, the environmental satellites, whose main task is to monitor the global weather conditions. These meteorological satellites are either geostationary (GEOS, METEOSAT) with an altitude of 36000 km above the earth or polar-orbiting (NOAA-7, NOAA-9) with a flight altitude of around 860 km. The METEOSAT data can be received every 30 minutes, whereas the NOAA-9 data could be obtained twice a day. This frequent acquisition of data allows the weather forecasters to predict imminent hazards early enough.

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