Africa Open DEAL 

FAO- The African Union 

Source data

FAO/ African Union 

Methodology

More than 350 African experts with knowledge of landscapes, GIS and land uses conducted the data collection using the free open-source software tool Collect Earth. The interpretation was made throughout 2019‒2020 in 16 nationally and regionally focused workshops (Collect Earth trainings and group data collection, called Mapathons) convened by FAO in collaboration with government and regional institutions including the Panafrican Agency of the Great Green Wall (PA-GGW) and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). 

Sampling Design 

The assessments draw on information from more than 300,000 sampling plots in Africa. The plots were distributed over stratified systematic grids for which the continent has been divided in (i) the hyper-arid zones, which were sampled at a lower intensity (20x20 km) because of the relative homogeneity of the landscape, and (ii) the nonhyper arid areas with a sampling intensity of 10x10 km. In addition, the Great Green Wall area has had a sampling design with a denser grid (6.5x6.5 km). At the national level, some of the countries opted for higher sampling density (e.g. Tunisia 4x4 km or Eswatini 2x2 km) in order to improve the accuracy of collected data 

Collected Data

Around 120 different environmental variables and land parameters were collected, including numbers and density of trees, existence of infrastructures, wild fires etc. 

Data Accurracy

3,200 plots (or 1 percent of the total sampling plots) were randomly selected throughout the continent, and were re-interpreted by FAO experts to quantify the measurement error. The overall accuracy, also including the sampling error, is estimated at over 90 percent over the whole sample with specific parameters, with uncertainties below 3 percent.