NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online webinar series: Earth Observations for Humanitarian Applications. Refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs), and other displaced populations are made more vulnerable to climate change impacts due to their socio-political marginalization. This three-part, intermediate training presents concrete strategies for mapping localized climate conditions with risks faced by refugee and IDP communities around the world.

The training will focus on flood risk assessments and specific challenges for assessing flood risk in refugee and IDP camps; gauging long-term heat stress in refugee camps and the challenges with decision making surrounding heat risk; and monitoring drought effects on agricultural landscapes in refugee settings using Earth observations (EO) to explore the correlations between anomalies in crop productivity and weather-based factors

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online webinar series: Assessing the Impacts of Fires on Watershed Health. This advanced-level, three-part training will focus on using remote sensing observations for monitoring post-fire impacts on watershed health. Specifically, this training will highlight uses of NASA Earth observations (EO) for pre-fire land cover mapping, watershed delineation and stream mapping, post-fire burn severity mapping, and pre- and post-fire riverine and freshwater water quality.

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.

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) opened a new open, online intermediate webinar series: Biodiversity Applications for Airborne Imaging Systems. This four-part webinar series will focus on NASA Earth Observations (EO) that can be used characterize the structure and function of ecosystems and to measure and monitor terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity.

The momentum is increasing around international land monitoring initiatives, together with an unprecedented demand for free, accessible, and usable land data and information. The land sector must find ways to seize opportunities presented by open data innovations while negotiating a rapidly changing data environment. 

The Land Portal and Open Data Charter have been working with the Government of Senegal to open up land data, following the guidance set forth in the Open Up Guide for Land Governance. The Open Up Guide is a practical guide for governments who are seeking to better collect, publish, and use land data for the public good. As Phase 1 of this project, the team has published the State of Land Information in Senegal (SOLI) Report. SOLI reports are research-driven analyses of the current state of land data that assess the available land information against open data standards. 

The webinar will:

• Share latest results from the Open Up Guide implementation pilot in Senegal and findings from the SOLI Senegal report 

• Ask and discuss questions concerning the interest in and maturity of open data in Senegal as it relates to land 

• Hear perspectives from the government of Senegal (ANAT, PROCASEF), donors (GIZ, World Bank), local community members, using specific case studies on data and land initiatives

This two-part webinar series will provide an overview of resources for choosing climate projection sets for mitigation, adaptation, and risk management applications.

Recent studies have shown that globally, riverine and coastal floods are increasing in intensity and duration. In addition, the number of people living in flood-prone areas has increased substantially during the last two decades.

Mapping Crops and their Biophysical Characteristics with Polarimetric SAR and Optical Remote Sensing

At night, satellite images of Earth capture a uniquely human signal - artificial lighting. Remotely-sensed lights at night provide a new data source for improving our understanding of interactions between human systems and the environment.