The project area is located in the community of "Diama" in the west of the Senegal River Valley. The irrigated agricultural landscape comprises a total surface of approximately 2,000 ha and is composed of more than 2,000 individual agricultural parcels, which have an average size of circa 1 hectare. For the project monitoring, two outcome indicators were mapped and quantified with satellite images: (i) the land-use specific area and (ii) a proxy for the rice productivity - each according to different land use categories - in four years (2017-2020).
Freely available, multi-temporal "Sentinel" 1/2 (Radar and optical images) satellite images from the Copernicus Earth observation program are used to assess the outcome indicators (Figure 1). First, to quantify the land-use area, machine learning algorithms were calibrated, based on in-situ collected ground observations of SAED, and the Sentinel 1/2 satellite images were classified. This output was multiple maps that show the cultivated area of different land use categories in four different years (2017-2020). Second, to proxy productivity without in-situ data, a so-called vegetation index was calculated, based on the Sentinel-2 satellite images. This vegetation index, called Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), shows changes in productivity over the years. And third, in order to harness ground collected yield samples by SAED, a yield estimation model, based on satellite imagery in four years (2017-2020), was calibrated in addition.