Communities of Practice

A space for brainstorming and solving problems about how to use Earth observation in climate-sensitive agriculture

Caption: This satellite image from the European Space Agency, of northwest Lesotho – a small, land-locked country surrounded entirely by South Africa – was created by combining three separate images from the near-infrared channel from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission over a period of nine months. Lesotho’s agricultural system faces a growing number of issues, including a small portion of the land deemed arable, as well as other climate-related vulnerabilities such as drought, floods and extreme temperatures occurring more frequently. All other colors visible in the image are different mixtures of red, green and blue, and vary according to the stage of vegetation growth. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission is designed to provide images that can be used to distinguish between different crop types as well as data on numerous plant indices, such as leaf area, leaf chlorophyll and leaf water.is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021-22), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Bringing together impact evaluators, remote sensing experts, and field partners

We seek to expand the use types of Earth observation, encourage more learning and cross-fertilization, and reduce the technical and managerial barriers to access and use Earth observation across the spectrum of agriculture impact evaluations.

Through these communities of practice, we also hope to develop resources for implementing organizations to understand the benefits of Earth observation (EO) and walk them through the process of designing and managing an EO-based IE project. These resources will be designed by the GeoField team in partnership with other implementing partners, to ensure that they meet the needs of end users.

Our goal with these communities of practice is to enable more powerful evaluation and learning about what works in climate-sensitive global agricultural development. An additional motivation is to better understand existing and historical efforts in this area of research and implementation (remote sensing, impact evaluations, agriculture, climate, etc.), so that we can all build upon, connect, advance, and increase the value of the past research and efforts made by others.