From Australia to Africa - A Digital Earth Journey

P U B L I C S E C T O R
S U M M I T
Washington DC

© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.P U B L I C S E C TO R
S U M M I T
From Australia to Africa
- A Digital Earth Journey
Steven Ramage, GEO Secretariat on behalf of Trent Kershaw
Program Director - Digital Earth Australia, Geoscience Australia
S e s s i o n I D

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Agenda
Introduction
Digital Earth Australia
Leading to Digital Earth Africa

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Geoscience Australia
Geoscience Australia is Australia's
pre-eminent public sector
geoscience organisation.
Nation's trusted advisor on the
geology and geography of Australia.
Apply science and technology to
describe and understand the Earth
for the benefit of Australia.

S U M M I T
AWS Journey
4 years and counting.
50+ applications across 8 multi-
disciplinary teams.
80 AWS services used in production,
including beta program participants
for 6 service launches in the last two
years.
PBs of storage and going serverless
everywhere!

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Digital Earth
Australia
Will increase the efficiency and
effectiveness of the Australian
Government’s investments and
improve how we manage our
natural resources.

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Digital Earth
Australia
7,692,024 km2
Over 30 years of satellite data
10-30m resolution
2 PB data

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Mapping Persistent
Water Bodies
There are hundreds of thousands of
persistent water bodies in Australia.

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Mapping Persistent
Water Bodies
There are Xxx,000 persistent water
bodies in Australia

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How full?

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E.g. Dam 69
Year dam was
built

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Current snapshot of drought in NSW
Oct 2016 Mar 2019

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Ginini Flats

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Ginini Flats
Green vegetation Wet vegetation
Non-green vegetation Open water
Bare ground

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Include stats on preferred
infrastructure provider from survey
Global opportunities

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Estimating Biomass for Industry
They do everything on AWS.
Make sure it includes stats of Red
Meat sector (pretty sure it does
already)
TSDM kg/ha
Machine Learning
TSDM per paddock
Crowdsourcing
of producer data
Fully calibrated 10m imagery, 5 daily
Fractional Cover

S U M M I T
Influencing Others
• Co-design decision-ready
products with real users.
• Rapid prototyping.
• Always target automation:
• Reproducibility;
• Reliability;
• Efficiency.

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Why an Industry Consultation?

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Industry
Consultation
Process
• DE Australia Industry Impressions report
• Webinar recordings
• Presentations
• Training material re: accessing and using DE Australia
frontiersi.com.au/opportunities/dea/

S U M M I T
DE Australia Industry Strategy
DEA aims to increase the use of EO data and products by
lowering barriers to its exploitation by Australian businessesVision
Areas of Focus
Guiding principles and Activities

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DE Australia Labs
• Small incubator program
• Open to any company, any size
• Projects solve end user problems and industry challenges
• Real, measurable end user benefits
• Collaboration and support provided by DEA Program
• IP is owned by funding recipients
• Part of an ecosystem of collaborators, investors, SMEs, industry
• Influence the overall DEA Program direction
Accelerate adoption of EO
and DE Australia technology
through funding and support

S U M M I T
opendatacube.org

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Digital Earth Africa
Digital Earth Africa will provide an
operational data infrastructure
deployable in the cloud or locally that
gives the government control over its
management.

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African Countries more capacity for
applying Earth observation data to
national development objectives and
the UN 2030 Agenda and the Africa
2063 Agenda.

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Tracking agricultural change

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Local Scale
Water Quality Monitoring: Lake Burley Griffin

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Drought resilience workflow - Tanzania
1. Set up analysis2. Import data, mask clouds3. WOfS Analysis4. Vectorize water bodies5. Compute % full for each date6. Show time series for each water body

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Drought status for Tanzania
Inundation percentage compared to
maximum waterbody extent

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Inundation % contours Interpolated ‘relative’ topography
Mapping relative waterbody topography

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There is a 13% loss in dense vegetation from 2000 to 2017. These
illegal mines have a significant impact to land and water resources.
2000 2017
Vegetation
Mask
Illegal Mining: Ankobra River, Ghana

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Kumasi-Ghana Urbanization
Urbanization in Kumasi, Ghana –
2002 to 2018 (16 years)
Urban Growth = 6.7% per year
(Landsat-7 Fractional Cover Bare Soil >
40%)
Population Growth = ~ 3 % per year
(according to web sources, census
data)
What does this tell us? Kumasi is
rapidly expanding its urban footprint
at a rate that is 2x faster than the
population is growing. Is this
population growth and urban area
expansion sustainable and what are
the impacts?
2002
2018

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SDG 6.6.1 - Water Extent
Lake Sulunga in Tanzania
From 2014 to 2018, there is a net loss of 3.8% of
water pixels. This is considered an “Unmodified
Natural” change or ”Class-A”.
Analysis followed the SDG 6.6.1a indicator methodology
(20 Jan 2017) and used the Landsat WOFS water
detection algorithm.

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Lake Guiers in Senegal
Feb 2013 to Dec 2016
Total Suspended Matter (TSM)
SDG 6.3.2 - Water Quality
Maximum Variability

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Outcomes from the ARDC
• A significant reduction in satellite data
preparation time and improved access for users =
more users taking advantage of these data
• Increased awareness across governments and
national statistical agencies eager to apply these
data to problems
• Increased capacity building and knowledge through
on-site and virtual trainings
• Further in-country ownership on data products and
solution options including validation and
algorithm development
• The ARDC is allowing for the application of
multiple optical and radar datasets to address key
problems

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Open Data Cubes
Enabling Decision Ready Products

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Making Satellite Data Free and Open

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Africa Regional Data Cube
A data cube provides analytically ready
data across decades allowing for easily
accessible geospatial analysis on key
environmental issues.

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Phase I Objectives
• Developing a coalition of partners and investors;
• Undertaking public communications including significant
stakeholder engagement and workshops
• Identifying the key political, institutional, financial, capacity
building and technical issues and opportunities
• Understanding the landscape to identify alignment
opportunities
• Build awareness, buy-in and approach for Phase II
• Identify potential funding sources for next phase

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Operational Data Cube for All of Africa
• Operational Data Cube for whole of Africa
• Regular decision ready product / not research
• Automated, run for every pixel for entire
continent
• Levering off other ODC developments
• New institutional home- (Host TBD)~30 staff
• Flexible cloud/HPC Infrastructure
• Funded for production of product and capacity
building/App development
• Multilateral effort, not owned by one country
• Interoperability allowing for connections with other
platforms to share data and algorithms

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Technical Roadmap
• Product “Road-map” agreed by expert user-groups
• Technical Advisory Committee will agree on which
products are most likely to succeed
• Leverage other work from Australia and elsewhere
• Agile development methods
• Minimum viable products
• Iteration of experience with users
• Innovate to produce new product possibilities
• Analysis Ready Data as an input
• Asking the space agencies to produce standardized
analysis ready data (surface reflectance etc.)
• Open Architectures
• Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs;, STAC,
• Open Geospatial Community (OGC) services
• Open to other tools – ESRI; QGIS

S U M M I T
DE Africa
Phase II – Setting the Foundation
• Establish the Governance, Host and
Staffing
• Board and Advisory Committees
• Hosting agreement with UNECA
• Formal Launch event and workshop
• Recruitment
• Country and Stakeholder Engagement
• Information sharing and alignment
• Needs, priorities and requirements
• Partnerships
• Technical Implementation
• ODC platform and roadmap
• Analysis Ready Data – USGS, JAXA, EC
• Cloud infrastructure
• GEO Plenary – Showcase (Nov 19)

S U M M I T
Cloud Infrastructure

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Digital Earth Africa 3 Year Strategy

S U M M I T
Earth observations are
data and information
collected about our
planet, whether
atmospheric, oceanic or
terrestrial. This includes
space-based or remotely-
sensed data, as well as
ground-based or in situ
data.
GEO-AWS EARTH OBSERVATION
CLOUD CREDITS PROGRAMME

S U M M I T
GEO has members in 105 countries,
and the GEO-AWS collaboration has
broadened engagement to other
countries.

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GEO is an
intergovernmental
partnership that
improves the
availability, access,
understanding and
use of Earth
observations for the
benefit of society.

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www.earthobservations.org/aws.php

S U M M I T
Thank you!
S U M M I T
Steven Ramage - @steven_ramage
www.linkedin.com/in/stevenr
Aditya Agrawal - @D4DInsights
www.linkedin.com/in/agrawaladitya/
Trent Kershaw
www.linkedin.com/TrentKershaw

From Australia to Africa - A Digital Earth Journey

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