Africa’s biodiversity and ecosystems are central to the continent's green transition, yet effective conservation strategies rely heavily on the availability of accurate, accessible, and interoperable environmental data. While emerging initiatives, such as the Africa Regional Centers of Excellence Programme (ArcX), are establishing critical reference points for biodiversity data, significant technical and systemic challenges remain in harmonizing fragmented datasets across borders.
This session addresses the intersection of open science, spatial data harmonization, and cloud-based environmental computing applied to African landscapes. We aim to showcase innovative technological solutions and collaborative frameworks that bridge the gap between data scarcity and actionable ecological insights.
We welcome contributions from researchers, data scientists, and practitioners focusing on, but not limited to:
• The development, deployment, and scaling of open-source architectures and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) tailored to African contexts.
• Novel Earth Observation (EO) applications and machine learning workflows for feature extraction and biodiversity monitoring in data-scarce regions.
• Strategies, standards, and case studies for cross-regional data harmonization (e.g., integrating data across Central, Western, and Eastern Africa).
• Successful capacity-building frameworks, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data practices, and cross-border partnerships that enable open environmental data sharing.
By bringing together geospatial informatics and spatial ecology, this session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on building robust data ecosystems that empower sustainable ecosystem management across Africa.