Expertise and experience
The Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) is a centre of excellence
for training and geo-information technologies and for providing technical
assistance and consultancy in the field of tropical and subtropical
agriculture and environmental protection. It constitutes the technical
and scientific branch of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MAE);
it provides support and consulting service to MAE, technical assistance
to developing countries and countries in transition for sustainable
development, capacity development, poverty reduction, food security,
natural resources management.
IAO has carried out several projects in the following thematic areas:
- Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security (China, Guatemala,
Libya, Morocco, Senegal);
- Geo-spatial Information Technologies (partner of the Africover
Project and projects in Ecuador, Senegal, Tunisia);
- Natural Resources Protection and Fight against Poverty
(Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Angola);
- Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Bio-safety (China and Brazil).
IAO has also a long-standing tradition in Training, being today one of
the most important centre with training programmes, seminars, workshops
organized and implemented on a wide range of subjects related to agriculture,
rural development, environment, food security, geomatics and GIS among
others.
The CARBOAFRICA project involves the Natural Resources unit, which have
a long experience in land cover mapping and natural resources evaluation.
IAO will contribute to Wp1 by providing reliable land cover data and
aboveground carbon stock estimates, which are baseline information for
the successive project activities.
Role in this project
WP1: Land cover databases analysis, integration and validation; Biomass
field data collection and elaboration; Production of an aboveground
C stock database for the sub-Saharan Africa at the resolution of the
land cover database.
Principal Investigator and collaborators
Luca Ongaro, Scientific Responsible, Agronomist, has 24
years of experience in the following sectors: natural vegetation
inventory and evaluation; application of informatics to environmental
sciences; Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems. Since 1984
he works as official at the Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO)
and at present time he is Director of the Professional Master in
"Geomatics and Natural Resources Evaluation". His main activities are:
technical and scientific organization of the Professional Master;
high-level training in GIS and Remote Sensing; development of Internet-based
Information Systems.
Paolo Sarfatti, Scientific Responsible, Agronomist, has
23 years of experience in the following sectors: international scientific
co-operation activities on Agricultural Research for Development;
Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems; natural resources
evaluation for agriculture and rural development; land use/land cover
mapping for agriculture and forestry. He is Technical Director at the
Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) since 2002 and his main
activities at IAO include: national and international scientific
cooperation activities on Agricultural Research for Development;
applied research on natural resources evaluation for rural development
utilizing remote sensing and GIS tools; technical assistance and
consultancy in the framework of development projects; training;
institutional activities. Most of the activities are carried out in
close co-operation with research institutions in different African
countries with a special attention to capacity and institutional building.
Valerio Avitabile, Principal investigator, Forester, has
4 years of experience in the following fields: forestry; carbon
sequestration evaluation in terrestrial ecosystems; natural resources
evaluation in forested areas; Geographic Information Systems. He is
Research Fellow at the Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) since
2004 and is working on the subject "Use of Land Cover data for the
evaluation of carbon sequestration capability of terrestrial ecosystems".
His main activities include: data review and data processing; database
elaboration; methodology development for biomass/carbon estimates in
vegetated areas; model development.
Elisabetta Petrocchi, Collaborator, Geologist, has 5 years
of experience in the following sectors: optical remote sensing, image
processing and Geographic Information System; geological/tectonic
interpretation of satellite imagery and aerial photos; training courses
and consultancy on remotely sensed software; data transmission. She is
a consultant at Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) since 2005.
Her main activities are: software and hardware management; project
development; software debugging; data processing.
Federico Breda, Collaborator, Environmentalist, has 2
years of experience in the following fields: land cover mapping,
Remote sensing for natural resources evaluation, GIS modeling of
land cover dynamics, land evaluation. He is Research Fellow at the
Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) since 2004 and he is
developing methods and techniques to enhance land cover databases
with information on vegetation dynamics and ecology. His main
activities include: remote sensing data processing and classification;
methodology development for vegetation dynamics detection; model
development for land cover changes detection and description; database
analysis.
Example publications
Avitabile V., Drigo R., Di Gregorio A., Sarfatti
P., 2005. Use of land cover data for woody biomass stock estimates in
Eastern and Central Africa. Proceedings of the conference AfricaGIS 2005,
31 October - 4 November, CSIR International Conference Centre, Pretoria,
South Africa.
Delli G., Sarfatti P., Cadi A., 2002.
Classification of historical series of NDVI: an application for northern
Algeria. Journal of Agriculture and Environment for International
Development -Vol. 96 N° 3/4.
Di Gregorio A., Ongaro L., Sarfatti P., 1989.
Land cover monitoring using remote sensing data (SW Bhutan 1977-1988).
'Global natural resources monitoring and assessments', IUFRO/FAO, 24- 30
September 1989, Venice.
Di Gregorio A., Sarfatti P., Laurin G.V., 2005.
The Global Land Cover Network: innovation and experiences in land cover
mapping for ARD and land use planning. International conference on
agriculture research for development: European responses to changing
global needs. 27-29 April 2005, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
Zurich, Switzerland.
Jansen L., Mahamadou H., Sarfatti P., 2003. Land
cover change analyses using LCCS. Journal of Agriculture and Environment
for International Development -Vol. 97 N° 1/2.
Landmann T., Breda F., Di Gregorio A.., Sarfatti
P., Delli G., 2005. Looking towards a new African land cover dynamics
data set: The Medium Resolution Data-Base for Africa (MEDA). Proceedings
of the conference AfricaGIS 2005, 31 October - 4 November, CSIR
International Conference Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.
Ongaro L., 1998. Land Unit mapping for Land
Evaluation. Relazioni e Monografie Agrarie Tropicali e Subtropicali
n° 115. Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare, Firenze, 1998.
Sarfatti P., Delli G., Ongaro L., Mollicone D.,
1998. Using Landsat TM Data for Poplar Cultivated Areas Estimation in
Konya-Eregli Region (Anatolia, Turkey). Symposium on "Operational
Remote Sensing for Sustainable Development", 11-14 may 1998, Enschede,
The Netherlands.
