Assessing and preventing the Impact of Desert Locust through Machine Learning
- The Results
Challenge completed! Results follow soon.
Kenya Red Cross Society is the leading humanitarian agency and the strongest humanitarian brand in Kenya. 50 technology changemakers are leveraging satellite and drone imagery for assessing the impact of desert locust in various regions.
The problem
Already, 3.1 million people in arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya are food insecure, and increased breeding of desert locusts, coupled with a recent flooding as well as Covid-19 pandemic, poses a wider risk of food and pasture shortage.
Regionally, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda host 25.3 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity, which is 28% of the case-load of Africa. Of these, more than 11 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are located in areas currently affected by the desert locust infestations.
The following is a short sequence, recorded in Kenya in May 2020, which shows the scale of the problem.
The project goals
The project team will use satellite and drone imagery for a desert locust impact assessment study. The main objectives will be:
- Deriving accurate vegetation cover types e.g. pastureland and cropland masks from sentinel 1 and 2 imagery for the 16 counties that were adversely affected by desert locusts. This includes looking into what land cover maps exist to improve the quality of a vegetation outlook in real/near real-time.
- Quantifying the impact on desert locusts via drone imagery and classification models. This will help to measure the desert locust impact on croplands and pasturelands by hectares. The data comes from multispectral drone imagery captured by the WingtraOne drone.
This challenge is hosted with our friends at
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KRCS is the leading humanitarian agency and the strongest humanitarian brand in Kenya, the East Africa region, and Africa. At the national level, operations are spearheaded by a management team led by the Secretary-General while at the county level, KRCS is governed by boards and administratively managed by a Regional Manager.
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The International Center for Humanitarian Affairs (ICHA) strives to create an appropriate and effective knowledge management framework that synthesizes multiple information technologies to collect, analyze, and, manage information and knowledge for supporting decision making in humanitarian action, disaster relief, and improving community resilience.
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The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data is a global network working together to ensure the new opportunities of the data revolution are used to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
