Linking Land Use Land Cover and Ecosystem Services

By: Rahinatu Sidiki Alare and Ophelia Kaba-Ayamba

Miss Rahinatu Sidiki Alare, a Technical Officer of the ASSAR Project,  and Ophelia Kaba-Ayamba, an  Environmental Science PhD Student at the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies (IESS) of the University of Ghana participated in the Linking Land Use Land Cover and Ecosystem Services workshop aimed at collaboratively analyzing and interpreting issues related to climate change adaptation.

The 10-day (27th March - 5th April, 2017) learning workshop, organized by The Suri Seghal Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, ATREE, Bangalore with support from START saw seventeen (17) participants drawn from West, East and Southern Africa, and India. Milind Bunyan, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and Jagdish Krishnaswamy, a Senior Fellow at ATREE facilitated the workshop with the support of ATREE and IIHS staff.

What did we learn?

Participants were introduced to QGIS and had practical sessions of creating simple maps. This was followed up by an introduction to R programming where participants learnt how to import, visualize and analyse spatial data. Additionally, participants identified trends in vegetation using NDVI3g data and had the opportunity of working on shape files of their study areas.
In a visit to ATREE, participants played the Tipping Point Game and also shared with others, ecosystem services related research activities in their respective regions. Teja Malladi, a Senior Associate at IIHS showed participants around the lakes of Bangalore and also explained the impacts of urbanization on these lakes.

Way Forward
With the enhanced capacities in analyzing spatial data, each region will work along with Milind to analyze trends in climate and vegetation using MODIS and NDVI3g data. Results from the respective regional LULC research activities will be published as outputs.