New WaPOR portal presented during the project meeting at FAO Headquarters
The WaPOR team, international project partners and data service providers met last week at FAO Headquarters in Rome, Italy.
Mr Lifeng Li, Director, and Ms Sasha Koo-Oshima, Deputy Director of the FAO’s Land and Water Division, also participated in the meeting and welcomed FAO colleagues and partners. Mr Aart van der Horst, Senior Policy Adviser, participated on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands, which provides financial support to the project.
The participants and partners discussed each country situation, lessons learnt and way forward. Marloes Mul, Sajid Pareeth and Seleshi Yalew (IHE Delft) presented the work related to Capacity development. Petra Schmitter, Nafn Amdar and Muluken Adamseged (IWMI) discussed the Compendium of solutions. Other colleagues joined online.
The presentation of WaPOR V3 took place on Friday 5, with the participation of about 40 people on-site and 120 online. Mr Lifeng Li opened the presentation event. Annemarie Klaasse (eLEAF) presented the improvements of the new database, Karl Morteo and Alyne Spencer (FAO) presented the new WaPOR portal and website and the resources available to users, Marloes Mul (IHE Delft) and Petra Schmitter (IWMI) provided a summary of activities being supported by the project in partner countries.
WaPOR, FAO's portal to monitor Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data is migrating to the FAO Hand in Hand platform and will feature data obtained through an updated methodology (version 3.0). Since its first beta release in April 2017, the WaPOR portal has been freely providing users with near real time data (every 10 days) on water productivity and other related variables that lend themselves to a variety of uses such as irrigation scheduling advise for farmers, monitoring and improving agricultural production, water accounting, irrigation performance assessment, drought monitoring, assistance for transhumance, among others. Since that beta release, the data has been continuously improved to ensure it is as adequate as possible to its users' needs and to keep pace with developments in open remote sensing.