PyWaPOR training in Delft on the use of remote sensing for agricultural water management

The IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, a key partner in the WaPOR project, offered a short intensive course (workload of 84 hours) on Remote Sensing for Agricultural Water Management in its premises in Delft, The Netherlands, between March 3 and 14. The course’s attendance was not restricted to WaPOR stakeholders yet it is a central contribution of IHE to the capacity building of national stakeholders of the project. 20 of the course participants were part of the WaPOR project.

The course aims to develop skills in the parametrization and production of high resolution WaPOR data (20m at a daily timestep) using varied remote sensing inputs to estimate and characterize agricultural water use and biomass production for any  study area, principally the ones for which the WaPOR portal does not provide data at this resolution. This is done using the python implementation of the WaPOR algorithm pyWaPOR.

WaPOR project stakeholders from Mali, Kenya, Pakistan and Colombia (national project coordinators of the WaPOR project accompanying 3 to 4 key persons from the national institutions that are using the data) attended the short course. These attendees were coming from a variety of country institutions already using WaPOR data and seeking to increase their capacity to use it, including in areas that are not covered by level 3 data (more information here, see “Spatial resolution” tab). Additionally, two staff from the WaPOR team at FAO headquarters attended the course, improving their capacity to support the project and its beneficiaries. WaPOR participants were appointed by these partner institutions. Due to the advanced level of the course, WaPOR participants needed to have had prior exposure to WaPOR in country events and successfully complete the WaPOR open course on "Python for geospatial analyses using WaPOR data".

Though there was overlap between this training and the month of Ramadan which regarded some of the participants, all were very engaged and reported learning a great deal from this opportunity and feeling more confident in their use of WaPOR data in their professional context. All participants were successful and were awarded certificates of completion.

	Some photos of the course and an example of a slide from participant presentations (here team Mali displaying their findings on locally defined water and crop productivity targets for the Sélingué irrigation scheme).