Enabling Discovery of African Geospatial Resources

Abstract

In Africa, natural resources are degrading, while being at the same time essential for maintaining or improving people's livelihood. The well-being of African communities is highly correlated to changes in local ecosystem services. Their vulnerability to degradation of natural resources is extremely high and resilience against natural changes (e.g. climate variability) and socio-economic changes (e.g. fluctuations in food markets) is low. Nowadays, it is widely accepted that reversing these trends and adapting to climate change require integrated responses tackling the underlying social, economic, political and institutional drivers of unsustainable use of natural resources. Integrated approaches intrinsically ask for cooperation, exchange of information and communication to better understand complex interactions and assess environmental issues. Understanding these interactions requires collecting and integrating various data describing physical, chemical, biological and socio-economic conditions. However, two common obstacles are currently preventing the implementation of such integrated approaches: (1) difficulties to find data, and (2) difficulties to integrate data. In response to these issues, this paper presents the Africa Discovery Broker, a web-based tool that enables users working in different domains to search through and access 32442 heterogeneous African geospatial resources (e.g. remote sensing, geospatial data, socio- economic data) coming from 17 international, regional, national and research projects repositories.