GlobWetland Africa Toolbox: Implementing Earth Observation based Wetland Monitoring Capacity in Africa

Radoslaw Guzinski

The availability of the growing volume of environmental data from the Sentinel satellites represents a unique opportunity for the operational usage of Earth Observation (EO) for wetland inventorying, assessment and monitoring on global scale. However, it also poses major challenges in terms of data access and exploitation to achieve its full potential. GlobWetland Africa (GWA) Toolbox is an outcome of an initiative of the European Space Agency launched to facilitate the exploitation of satellite observations for the conservation, wise-use and effective management of wetlands in Africa. It is a fully free and open-source software toolbox that seamlessly combines algorithms from a number of EO and GIS tools like SNAP, QGIS, OrfeoToolbox, GRASS GIS, TauDEM together with customised Python and R scripts (e.g. for hydrological modelling) into one GUI based on QGIS. This is achieved by relying heavily on the QGIS Processing Toolbox. The algorithms are then combined into workflows, which guide less experienced users through step-by-step process of EO data analysis for wetland delineation, wetland habitat mapping, monitoring of inundation regimes and water quality as well as for mangrove mapping and river basin hydrology assessments.

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