Training trainers in drone remote sensing with application to afforestation

Afforestation is needed to mitigate soil erosion and the rapid sedimentation of reservoirs for hydropowerproduction in western Burundi but needs to be selective, as the dense population of farmers in this area alsorequires land for crop production. Decision support systems are useful to find compromise solutions butrequire good quality data on current land cover distribution and topography. Drone acquired imagery canoffer such good quality data at low cost, but the re-quired trained personnel is missing in Burundi. Therefore,this project proposal deals with ca-pacity building in drone image acquisition and processing as the core andwith afforestation planning in micro-catchments as an application domain. This project is in the directprolongation of a project in the VLIR-UOS/UB IUC in which erosion was assessed on experimental plots. Itbrings innovative techniques to support other national and local initiatives.