The aim of this event is increasing public understanding of the links between climate change, disasters, and land tenure rights, and bringing land tenure issues in the climate change discourse, listening particularly to the voices of civil society and youth. The discussion is also expected to bring forth some ideas for action both for the new GFAR Collective Action on land tenure and climate change, and for policy makers.    

When our global community unites, the energy is unstoppable. That’s why FIG and the local organisers, NSPS, are thrilled to invite you for the FIG Working Week 2023. Look forward to an exciting week-long conference that brings the international community of surveying and spatial professionals together to experience a mix of interesting technical sessions and workshops, a trade exhibition and a variety of side events and social functions. 

After two weeks of tense talks, the recent UN Biodiversity Conference COP15 ended with a landmark agreement to guide global action on nature through to 2030. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), includes concrete measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030. 

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online webinar series: Application of NASA SPoRT-Land Information System (SPoRT-LIS) Soil Moisture Data for Drought. This 3-part webinar series is focused on the introduction of the NASA Land Information System (LIS) output of soil moisture at various depths for drought analysis and monitoring. Examples from operational applications as well as practice exercises (for using LIS data for drought monitoring) will be included in this course. Access to the SPoRT-LIS products via online viewer, in GIS formats, and GIS-based display tools, will also be included. Moreover, self-paced microlessons will be available to help users confirm their understanding and improve their skill via homework lessons between live sessions.

These webinars aim to raise awareness on the value of tenure security and its contribution to biodiversity conservation, sustainable land management, ecosystem restoration, and climate change mitigation and adaptation while improving food security and local livelihoods.

This side event will serve to introduce the Land Portal’s State of Land Information Index (SOLIndex), which measures openness of land data at the country and global level. The aim of this index is to make land-related findings more actionable and to complement existing land governance monitoring systems, such as tools developed by GLTN. The SOLIndex provides an overall indicator that assesses the openness of land data and information at global and country levels. The SOLIndex can be used as a diagnostic and advocacy tool for making land data more open and inclusive in support of good land governance.

This side event will explore the range of indicators that constitute the index, explore strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the collection of these indicators in an effort to obtain and incorporate feedback from GLTN Partners into the process of validating the indicator.

The objectives of this session are to highlight national, regional and global progress and accomplishments in outcome 3 of phase 3 of the GLTN program, to gather feedback from GLTN partners and receive proposals on the monitoring focus in phase 4, and to identify potential collaborative opportunities with GLTN partners to upscale monitoring of the land agenda.

The 9th GLTN Partners’ Meeting 20203 will focus on the lessons learnt from Phase 3 and reflect on the way forward towards Phase 4 of the GLTN programme.

As the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 approaches, the need to monitor progress on the development goals could not be clearer, as is the need to assess the role of data in advancing toward the goals.

The Fourth UN World Data Forum 2023 is scheduled to take place in Hangzhou, China, in April 2023. The UN World Data Forum aims to spur data innovation, nurture partnerships, mobilize high-level political and financial support for data, and build a pathway to better data for sustainable development.

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new online introductory webinar series: Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Earth Science. This three-part training, presented in English and Spanish, is open to the public and will provide attendees an overview of machine learning in regards to Earth Science, and how to apply these algorithms and techniques to remote sensing data in a meaningful way. Attendees will also be provided with end-to-end case study examples for generating a simple random forest model for land cover classification from optical remote sensing. We will also present additional case studies to apply the presented workflows using additional NASA data.

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new online advanced webinar series: Crop Mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Optical Remote Sensing. This three-part training, presented in English and Spanish, is open to the public and builds on previous ARSET agricultural trainings. Here we present more advanced radar remote sensing techniques using polarimetry and a canopy structure dynamic model to monitor crop growth. The training will also cover methods that use machine learning methods to classify crop type using a time series of Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2 imagery. This series will include practical exercises using the Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) and Python code written in Python Jupyter Notebooks, a web-based interactive development environment for scientific computing and machine learning.