G&A Consortia to participate in online Thematic Special Session on African Marine & Coastal Operational Services

This session was organized on October 30th, 2020, 1-3 PM UTC by the AIR Centre Networking Friday. It will focus on pan-continental African marine initiatives using EO data, technologies and services in support of African sustainable development. 

[Updated 30-10-2020]

[Updated 05-11-2020]

In the marine and coastal domains, the GMES-Africa initiative provides four consortia around the continent that are developing and implementing a variety of services, including the provision of oceanographic products, fisheries and aquaculture support, coastal ecosystem monitoring and maritime security.

As a joint initiative between the African and European Unions, there is strong emphasis on realising value from the data, information, expertise and know-how offered by the Copernicus programme. The South African National Oceans and Coastal Information Management System will also be presented.

The session will present a variety of earth-observation based services from around the continent – services that focus on providing actionable information in the marine and coastal domain to a variety of stakeholders. These services, whilst all focusing on providing knowledge-based decision making tools, have different regional priorities and approaches to user co-design and service delivery. The session will also include a substantial guided Q&A session to further gather user perspectives and needs.

Agenda: 

1:00 PM UTC - Welcome address and introductions (Stewart Bernard, SANSA)
1:05 PM UTC - Short Introduction to GMES-Africa (Tidiane Ouattara, AUC)
1:15 PM UTC - Marine and Coastal Areas Management in western Africa, Regional Marine Centre, University of Ghana (Kwame Agyekum, UG)
1:30 PM UTC - Earth Observation Operational Applications the Northern African Coastal Zone, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science (Islam Abou El-Magd, NARSS)
1:45 PM UTC - Marine and Coastal Management in the East Africa Region, Mauritius Oceanography Institute (Oomarsing Gooroochurn, MOI)
2:00 PM UTC - National Oceans and Coastal Information Management System (OCIMS), Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (Marjolaine Krug, DEFF)
2:15 PM UTC – GMES-Africa Marine and Coastal Service Development for Southern Africa (MarCoSouth), Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (Bolelang Sibolla, CSIR)
2:25 PM UTC - Application of EO services in South African small-scale fisheries (Greg Duggan, ABALOBI)
2:35 PM UTC - Q&A and user needs / audience response survey (Stewart Bernard, SANSA)
3:00 PM UTC - Closing remarks (Stewart Bernard, SANSA)

The dedicated webpage here is updated with the presentations.   

The edited, indexed recording, is available here.  

Some stats about the Weblive:

• 267 registrations from 49 countries: Angola, Argentina, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Benin, Bermuda, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Canada, Côte d'Ivoire, Croatia, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, French Guiana, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Guadeloupe, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Russian Federation, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America, Uruguay.  
• 156 attendees on Zoom plus a total of 219 YouTube views (including 81 views since Friday).  
• An ongoing user needs returned so far 26 responses.