E-Agriculture

forestry and ICTs News and Events

  • e-Agriculture Learning Activity Drones Webinar: Community Monitoring of Forests in Indigenous Territories in Panama

    WHEN: Friday 20 October 4PM Central European Summer Time - 9 AM Panama To enter the room use the following Adobe Connect link: http://fao.adobeconnect.com/e-agdronespanama/ In the framework of the e-Agriculture learning activity on drones , that runs on the e-Agriculture platform from 16 to 27 October, e-Agriculture is organizing a series of live webinars with different speakers addressing different aspects on the use of drones in agriculture and rural development. If you would like to receive notifications of all the webinars and the information of the activity you can register here Maria...
  • In Malaysia, drones are used to monitor and enforce forests

    Sarawak Forestry Corporation’s implemented a new initiative called GeoDrone to enhance its forest management activities, including monitoring and enforcement. Sarawak is one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. Chief Minister of Sarawak Datuk Patinggi Abang Johari Tun Openg declared: “The new drone initiative will help us to monitor the development of our forestry sector, which is important to Sarawak’s economy and contributes a lot of revenue". He also promised support to the SFC if it decided to equip the drones with the latest technology available, such as sensors to transmit...
  • GIS and Remote Sensing for sustainable forest monitoring and management Course

    GIS and Remote Sensing for sustainable forest monitoring and management Course Date 09th – 13th October 2017 Location Kigali, Rwanda Description Forestry involves the management of a broad range of natural resources within a forested area. We all agree Forestry is complex, dynamic, and...
  • Collect Earth: Land Use and Land Cover Assessment through Augmented Visual Interpretation

    Collect Earth is a free and open source software for land monitoring developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) . The software is part of the set of tools called Open Foris , and was developed with Google Earth , Bing Maps and Google Earth Engine . Collect Earth is designed so that users can analyze high and very high resolution satellite imagery for different purposes, including: Support multi-phase National Forest Inventories Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) assessments Monitoring agricultural land and urban areas Validation of existing...
  • WSIS 2017 prize winner: Latvias's Rural Support Service Electronic Application System

    Latvias's Rural Support Service Electronic Application System was named Action Line C7 E-agriculture winner at WSIS 2017 . The prize winners of the 18 different categories are a result of an online consultation resulting of more than 1.1 million votes casted. The Rural Support Service is responsible for the implementation of the European Union support policies in agriculture, forestry, fisheries and rural development. It supervises the compliance of the projects with the laws and regulations in place. The Electronic Application System (EAS) started as system for applying for payments to...
  • How Digital Technology Is Changing Farming in Africa

    In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, Ndubuisi Ekekwe explores how digital technology is poised at providing a solution to increase farm productivity in Africa. In this article he reviews the food challenges affecting Africa such as weather changes, rural-urban migration that deprives farming communities of young people and deforestation amongst many challenges. While African governments have employed many policy instruments to improve farm productivity, yields are still marginally improving. The article notes that African entrepreneurs are interested in how farmers work and how...
  • Global Forest Watch - Monitoring forests in near real time

    Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an interactive online forest monitoring and alert system designed for users to access the information they need to better manage and conserve forest landscapes. The mission of the Global Forest Watch is to provide the most precise information about the status of forest landscapes worldwide. GFW works in collaboration with NASA , Google and the University of Maryland to collect data on forest change which is displayed on an interactive map. Watch this introductory video by the Global Forest Watch: GFW is free and enables users to work with a wide variety of tools,...
  • Ecosia search engine: Plant trees while you search the web

    Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees each time you search for something. The Bing-powered search engine earns about half a Euro cent with each search and spends 28 cents to plant a tree. So to plant one tree Ecosia only needs about 56 searches. This way, the Berlin-based search engine has already planted over 7 million trees worldwide. Ecosia has focused on planting trees as it presents countless advantages, among which fighting climate change, restart water cycles, turn deserts back into fertile forests and provide nutrition, employment, education, medical assistance and political as...
  • Trees, forests and land use in drylands: The first global assessment. Conducted using Open Foris Collect Earth

    The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Global Drylands Assessment is a thematic study based on the visual interpretation of satellite images in publicly available repositories (such as Google Earth Engine and Bing Maps ) focusing on drylands. Results are reported at the global and regional levels. More than 200 experts with knowledge on land uses in specific dryland regions conducted the interpretation using the Open Foris software tool Collect Earth. Collect Earth communicates with Google Earth Engine to facilitate access to freely available satellite images from...
  • Open Tenure: An open source software designed by FAO to empower communities

    Open Tenure is an open source software designed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to help communities to better govern their natural resources. It uses handheld tablets, and a community server allows community members to map and collect data on land tenure claims in their community. The data can then be viewed and moderated, and important documents and photos can be stored electronically for safekeeping. This video presents the Open Tenure trial with a community forestry group in northwest Cambodia during 16-20 February 2016. The participants were quick to...