Event - 79747 - The Earth Institute - Columbia University

"The Earth Institute's Agriculture and Food Security Center (AgCenter) presents Africa Soil Information Service: Open Data Science for Agricultural Landscapes, a seminar with Markus Walsh, Senior Research Scientist, Ecosystems and Landscape Ecology, Agriculture and Food Security Center (AgCenter), The Earth Institute, Columbia University.  Open to the public. Landscape data and information, just like high quality seed and fertilizer, represent a critical production input for Africa�s rural communities, with potentially high returns on investment. This 30 minute presentation examines recent advances in generating agriculturally relevant information using open data science, agile software development and reproducible research approaches. The examples presented cover topics including: crowd sourcing of land cover observations, ground and UAV data collections, digital soil mapping and low-cost, high performance computing solutions for generating near-real-time predictions about the condition and changes of the agricultural landscapes of Africa. Markus Walsh is based at the Selian Agricultural Research Institute in Arusha, Tanzania, where he is the science coordinator for the Africa Soil Information Service. Since joining the Earth Institute, his research has focused on developing operational tools for diagnosis, mapping and monitoring of the ecological condition of African landscapes with an emphasis on the application of IT and data science in agriculture. Raised in Kenya, Markus has over 25 years of experience in ecosystems and landscape ecology research in Africa. Markus was a senior research scientist at the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) from 1997-2007, where he led research on land degradation assessment, monitoring and rehabilitation in the Lake Victoria Basin, based in Kisumu, Kenya."