Africa Soil Information Service

License: GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3)

Web Page: http://qed.ai/afsis-gsoc

Mailing List: google@qed.ai

The Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) is developing continent-wide digital soil maps for sub-Saharan Africa using new types of soil analysis and statistical methods, and conducting agronomic field trials in selected sentinel sites. These efforts include the compilation and rescue of legacy soil profile data, new data collection and analysis, and system development for large-scale soil mapping using remote sensing imagery and crowdsourced ground observations.

The project area includes ~17.5 million km2 of continental sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), encompassing more than 90% of Africa’s human population living in 42 countries. The project area excludes hot and cold desert regions based on the recently revised Köppen-Geiger climate classification, as well as the non-desert areas of Northern Africa.

AfSIS is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is supported by close scientific, operational and implementation partnerships with an ever-growing list of scientific organizations.

The project, in addition, works with a wide range of stakeholders across multiple scales as it seeks to develop demand driven products and services, support the institutional development of national soil services and build capacity and awareness for the improved management of natural resources. As such, AfSIS has established key partnerships with the governments of Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Ghana and continues to work closely with a number of international bodies through the Global Soil Consortium as well as government research and academic institutions in East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Oceania, and South America and the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) which combines the resources of 11 CGIAR Centers, The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and numerous international, regional and national partners.

Projects

• Open-Source Agronomy Data Collection Open-Source Agronomy Data Collection
• Open-Source UAV Processing For Ecological Research With guidance from mentors, inspect data processing workflow used by drone processing software, and help select amongst open source alternatives for each component in the workflow. Iteratively chain these alternatives together to produce an end-to-end open-source workflow that can replace the original, and implementing some parts from scratch here and there when there are no open source offerings.