Abstract​

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