The Challenge
Digital Earth Africa exists to improve the lives of people by translating Earth observations into insights that support sustainable development. Delivering reliable, operational services at a continental scale requires significant scientific expertise, technical capability, and global collaboration. As the program transitions to being Africa-led, ongoing support is essential to ensure the continued growth of its data catalogue and derived information products, empowering users across Africa to make better, evidence-based decisions.
Partners
Geoscience Australia, Digital Earth Africa, Digital Earth Africa Implementing Partners
The Solution
From July 2022 to June 2025, FrontierSI provided scientific and technical leadership to the Digital Earth Africa program. This included advising on the maintenance and development of data streams and platform capabilities, contributing to the development of continental-scale services, and supporting the training of Africa-based data scientists and developers.
From 2022 to 2023, FrontierSI supported the development and uptake of DE Africa’s Coastline Monitoring service, including:
- Conducting coastal change and impact analysis using the DE Africa Coastline Service
- Researching the complementary use of high-resolution optical and radar data for coastal mapping and change detection
- Developing a coastal change dashboard to support country engagement
In 2024, FrontierSI led the development of a dynamic, Africa-wide Waterbodies service, implementing and enhancing methods originally developed in Australia. Co-designed with African partners, the service provides easy access to historical and regularly updated water surface extent data for over 700,000 waterbodies, using more than three decades of Earth observation data.
Impact
Digital Earth Africa has attracted over 30,000 users globally. The platform hosts over 6 PB of data and provides access to a growing catalogue of continental services and over 140 open-source analysis tools.
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