The volume of earth observation and environmental data is growing rapidly, as is the urgent need for insights that can be derived from such data to inform decisions in a range of development areas including food and water security, sustainable natural resource management, disease early warning and disaster risk management. Unfortunately, taking full advantage of these resources has historically required considerable technical expertise and effort. One major hurdle is in basic information technology management: data acquisition and storage; databases and computing. This burden can put these invaluable data and tools out of the reach of many potential users, restricting access to experts with special access to high-performance computing resources.
In this talk, Rebecca will share examples and experiences of partners in the development community using the power of the cloud to overcome these issues. Emerging cloud technologies such as Google’s Earth Engine platform illustrate a new paradigm whereby anyone, anywhere with a web browser can have petabytes of fresh, relevant data at their fingertips, together with massive computational resources and peer-reviewed scientific methodologies to derive actionable insights from local to global scale. Cloud-based approaches can also facilitate collaboration and easy dissemination of results to policy makers, field practitioners and civil society.
Partner projects will be presented which illustrate best practices in water resource mapping, crop yield estimation, disease early warning and flood monitoring. Rebecca will also discuss lessons learned based on more than a decade of work in this area, touching on both opportunities and challenges in empowering people with big data to address significant sustainable development issues of our time.
