During the week of 15 to 17 October 2019, SASSCAL, the lead consortium member of WeMAST (Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Service for Transboundary Basins in Southern Africa), hosted an AUC (African Union Commission) delegation visit. Consortium members SANSA and the University of the Western Cape were also present.

WeMAST is in the process of developing an online decision-support platform, which will provide wetland stakeholders in SADC with EO (earth observation) based wetland monitoring and assessment services, tools and information. The WeMAST project will focus on four southern African basins: the Cuvelai, the Limpopo, the Okavango and the Zambezi basin.

WeMAST is one of 13 consortia awarded grants by the GMES and Africa Support Programme. The Programme is being funded jointly by the AU and the European Commission (EC) and is actively supported by the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme Copernicus and the EC JRC (Joint Research Commission).

With this support, WeMAST will benefit from the provided satellite-based products, which will include Sentinel 1 and 2 imagery, satellite-based rainfall products and satellite-based vegetation index products.

Consortium partner SANSA is currently putting in place a modular processing and data sharing structure that will feed the jointly developed WeMAST online wetland monitoring and assessment platform with processed and derived EO data. This system will include a Data Cube that will allow for the merging of data from different earth observation providers. The WeMAST online platform will ultimately offer a wetland monitoring and assessment service that will bring together earth observation products, value added remote sensing products, climate data, including SASSCAL WeatherNet data and in-situ data generated from field work in the chosen wetland study sites.