Menu
SERVIR has been set up in many regions of the world, and the Lower Mekong Region is one of them. SERVIR-Mekong focuses on predicting seasonal crop yields, assessing how future climate change will impact the region, monitoring the landscape and the ecosystem services it provides, and developing climate change adaptation tools for agriculture, rangelands, fisheries and aquaculture. Over large landscapes, in complex ecosystems, and in a changing climate, people often do not have the information they need to solve local, national, and regional land use challenges.
SERVIR-Mekong, a partnership between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and implemented by the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, is helping provide this vital information.
SIG, a leader in spatial informatics, supported SERVIR-Mekong in developing technologies that simplify accessing data and imagery from satellites. Once this data is easily accessible, analysts can integrate this information into tools and models that are tailored for the needs and technical capabilities of the on-the-ground users to those who need it most.
SERVIR empowers decision-makers with tools, products, and services to act locally on climate-sensitive issues such as disasters, agriculture, water, ecosystems, and land use. SERVIR-Mekong partners with leading regional organizations to help the five countries in the Lower Mekong Region: Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Vietnam.
Eco-Dash is another SERVIR-Mekong tool created with SIG support. Eco-Dash is a computerized tool that can track landscape-scale changes, as for example urban expansion, and increases or decreases in forest cover. The tool uses satellite imagery coupled with tools or methods to analyze those images – to track changes across the landscape and enable comparison of biological productivity in an area over time. Remote Sensing, an MPDI journal, recently published a scientific manuscript presenting the technology and methods applied in the ECO-DASH.
SIG also helped develop the historical flood analysis tool. Currently, there is lack of systematic flood risk analysis. Flood risk assessment requires several complex layers of information, including historical surface water levels, land use patterns, and the geo-and hydrological features of the land. Such information can be coupled with the mapping of the location of past floods and population location data, to inform users of the system about the likelihood of flooding and associated risks. Doing this sort of mapping manually is challenging because of the abundance of spatial and temporal data that is needed. The historical flood analysis tool overcomes these barriers by using satellite observation data from the Global Surface Water dataset, which contains data from 1984 to 2015 which can be analyzed easily to provide statistics on the extent and change of surface water. This tool then allows users to amp where and when floods are likely to occur, so that local populations can be moved or prepared as necessary.
This partnership with SERVIR has been a real success story for SIG, and for development. Not only have SIG been able to work with a lot of talented partner organizations, but the results of the work have had tangible positive impacts on the region. Government agencies and other users have been able to use the various tools to develop plans to sustain natural waterways, create land use plans that conserve the most carbon, and plan what to plant and when depending upon seasonal climate forecasts. And, it’s another one of a growing number of examples of how well-applied science and technology can directly help not just other specialists, but smallholder shrimp farmers too.
