🌍 AI in Africa - Radiant Earth

Deforestation

AI and satellite data are revolutionizing the way deforestation is monitored and prevented in Africa. By using satellite imagery, governments can establish monitoring systems that detect changes in forested areas, providing alerts for illegal deforestation activities. This technology offers a tangible solution for climate change mitigation by ensuring forests continue to sequester carbon dioxide.

Satellite imagery is providing that regular observation over a region that is forested. And how AI can help with that, and how the things that we do can help is, oh, a government wants to build a monitoring system that would basically run an algorithm every time there's a new observation available from the satellite and detect the boundary, the kind of spatial boundary of where are the forested areas and provide an alert or a kind of anomaly detection in the ML world.

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The consistent data from satellites, especially those in sun-synchronous orbits, allows for regular and global observations, making it easier to build models that help protect these vital areas 1 2.

   

Agriculture

In agriculture, AI and satellite data are providing new insights into crop classification and management. By using machine learning models with satellite imagery, governments can gain a better understanding of what crops are being grown in different regions, aiding in decision-making processes. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are used to augment data, improving the accuracy of crop type classifiers even in data-scarce regions.

If you have good reference data on the ground, not necessarily a full census, you can build a machine learning model that look at the time series of Sentinel two and then gives you basically a crop type of a region.

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Competitions and collaborations are fostering capacity development in Africa, exposing local talents to new challenges and enhancing their skills in geospatial and satellite imagery analysis 3 4.