Mapping deprivation in rural areas from Earth Observation Data

Tracking the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals and targeting interventions requires frequent, up-to-date data on social, economic and ecosystem conditions. My research seeks to examine the role that remotely sensed satellite data could have in mapping and monitoring socioeconomic conditions by exploring how household wellbeing and deprivation can be predicted from land use maps and building roof material type both derived from fine spatial resolution satellite data. We demonstrate that satellite data can predict wellbeing in Kenya with between 51 and 62% accuracy. Prediction accuracy was higher when using a multi-level approach to linking households to landscapes and most land use changes between 2005 and 2014 were observed in homesteads of the poorest households. High-resolution satellite data could provide a faster and cheaper way to track several SDGs but work so far across several research groups and countries has been based on secondary data analysis. However, a challenge lies in upscaling the work to regional and national levels to make it relevant to policy makers. We are exploring various approaches including CNNs to identify how we might best move forward.

Gary Watmough is an Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Land use and socio-ecological systems and deputy director of the MSc in Earth Observation at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. Prior to this position he was a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biosciences at Aarhus University in Denmark (2015-2017) and a Postdocotral Research Fellow in the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, USA (2012 – 2015). Dr. Watmough has worked as an interdisciplinary scientist on several projects linking Earth Observations data with Socioeconomic datasets in Nepal, India, Kenya and Mozambique. He has also worked with the International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD) examining the role that Earth Observation data can have in monitoring and evaluating development interventions. He gained his PhD in Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis from the University of Southampton, UK.