NEWS
Learning to use remote sens-
ing to establish woody plant en-
croachment in the savanna biome
Current Address: PhD Hydrology Student,
SAEON Grasslands-Forests-Wetlands Node and University of KwaZulu-Natal
Reprinted From: http://bit.ly/38ZlCVB
Tiffany Aldworth
T conditions, allowing radar satellites to
operate at night and during cloudy con-
ditions.
Optical satellites use visible and infra-
red sensors to detect the solar radiation
reflected from targets on the ground,
whereas radar satellites emit micro-
waves and calculate the time they take
to return to the sensor after reflecting
from targets. From 23 to 26 September, I attended
the first EMSAfrica Summer School on
the basics and applications of synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing for
environmental monitoring.
he two main types of satellite data
used in remote sensing to produce
images of the earth's surface in-
clude optical and radar.
Optical remote sensing is more com-
monly used but radar remote sensing
is more continuous, has an inherently
higher information content and a higher
resolution. Its biggest advantage is that
it is not affected by lighting or weather
First EMSAfrica Summer School
The summer school took place at the
Wits Rural Facility in Acornhoek, Mpu-
malanga. It consisted of a four-day
hands-on training course which fea-
tured a mixture of theory lessons and
corresponding practical tutorials using
Sentinel-1 data.
The summer school equipped me with
skills which will certainly benefit my re-
search. Overall it was a great experi-
ence, where I learnt a lot and made
many new connections. Many thanks to
the course organiser, Dr Christian Berg-
er from the Friedrich-Schiller University,
his team and the BMBF.
The course was also attended by SAE-
ON MSc students Keletso Moilwe and
Lungile Khuzwayo, whose projects fo-
cused on mapping invasive alien trees
in grasslands and fynbos respectively.
SAEON's Dr Gregor Feig and Dr Jasper
Slingsby are collaborators on the EM-
SAfrica project.
The coordinating institution was the
Department for Earth Observation,
Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena,
Germany, through the SPACES projects,
EMSAfrica (Ecosystem Management
Support for Climate Change in southern
Africa) and SALDi (South African Land
Degradation Monitor).
The summer school was funded by
the German Federal Ministry of Edu-
cation and Research (BMBF). Thirteen
students, researchers and technicians
from several southern African countries,
including South Africa, Swaziland and
Botswana, attended.
Figure 1: Tiffany's PhD research fo-
cuses on understanding the impacts of
woody plant encroachment on freshwa-
ter resources in South Africa’s savanna
biome
41
My PhD research focuses on under-
standing the impacts of woody plant
encroachment on freshwater resources
in South Africa’s savanna biome. The
research, which is being conducted in
a private game reserve in Phalaborwa
in the Limpopo province, is primarily
field based but I also plan to use remote
sensing to establish the extent and rate
of woody plant encroachment in the
area and to extract information to com-
pare with field observations and upscale
them to catchment and national scales.
Figure 2: Tiffany's PhD research fo-
cuses on understanding the impacts of
woody plant encroachment on freshwa-
ter resources in South Africa’s savanna
biome
Figure 3: The four-day training course
featured theory lessons and corre-
sponding practical tutorials using Senti-
nel-1 data
Grassroots
Vol 20
No 1
March 2020