The project was a unique demonstration of the full implementation of using Earth Observation to support the monitoring of wetland ecosystems on the national scale in Uganda.

Wetland monitoring is crucial for conservation and restoration of wetland ecosystems in Uganda which is explicitly mentioned in the national development plans. Hence, monitoring and reporting is not only important for reporting on the Sustainable Development Goal indicators, but should be anchored within and used by the national agencies to avoid further degradation of wetlands.

Within this project, a national baseline mapping of wetlands in Uganda was performed for 2016-2017 using all available Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery to act as a baseline for SDG indicator reporting.

This also included a training component with three training courses, leveraging the GlobWetland Toolbox for doing national-scale wetland mapping and the inclusion of field data for classifier training and product validation, where the engagement of the local stakeholders and experts are key.

The open source toolbox provided to the local stakeholders consists of a specific component producing statistics and reports for SDG reporting which can be used by e.g. the Uganda Bureau of Statistics who are responsible for the SDG indicator reporting at the national level.

This is available from the online portal where the data, statistics and reports can be explored by users and agencies.

One of the other key aims of the project was to use the implementation in Uganda as demonstration case for uptake of the tools and methods by the other RAMCEA member countries. This was obtained through participation of key staff from the other RAMCEA countries in the training workshops, and by delivering guidance documents on “lessons learned” and “roadmap” for a roll-out.

The online portal for the project is now operated by the Ministry of Water and Environment in Uganda.