CSIR is one of the leading scientific and technology research, development and implementation organizations in Africa. Its mandate is to perform multidisciplinary applied research and technological innovation in close association with national stakeholders and end-users with the aim of contributing to industrial development and improving the quality of life of South African. CSIR (ISO9001 and ISO 14001) has key alliances and partnerships with Government Departments, large private sector industries, nearly all South African and numerous international tertiary and research institutions, the Stockholm International Water Institute, the African Union through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) for water resource management. It is a founder member of the Global Research Alliance (GRA) and Regional Research Alliance (RRA).
The mandate of the Natural Resources and Environment (NRE) unit is to conduct directed inter-disciplinary research and technological innovation, with partners and stakeholders, in the field(s) of natural resources and the environment to contribute to the social, economic and environmental improvement of South Africa and Africa. NRE articulates its research programs according to four focus areas: adapting to and mitigating global change, ecosystem service delivery, securing water quality and quantity, and environmental solutions for a green economy. The Earth Observation research group conducts remote sensing research for improved understanding, management, and monitoring of ecosystems, and associated natural resources and services. Efforts are geared towards system-level remote sensing across various scales, which include ecosystem state description, modelling, change detection, and mapping. Applications focuses on vegetation structure and biomass, biodiversity and species, nutrient stress and biochemistry, sea surface temperature, ocean color, water quality and water use using multi-scale integration of multi-EO platforms (LiDAR, SAR, hyperspectral / optical data).
Principal Investigator:
Abel Ramoelo is a senior remote sensing scientist with the Earth Observation group at the CSIR-Natural Resources and Environment unit, South Africa. He has a PhD degree in remote sensing from the Faculty of Geo-information and Earth Observation, University of Twente (The Netherlands). He is a south African’s rated scientist with his core expertise on vegetation health assessment, biochemistry, and productivity mapping (e.g. nitrogen, phosphorus and biomass) using remote sensing systems at various scales, and published over 30 scientific and conference proceeding papers.
Abel is a principal investigator for CSIR’s contribution to ECOPOTENTIAL project. CSIR will be working closely with other project participants and Kruger National Park for the generation of remote sensing based products and collection of in situ data for use in various project work packages.