Innovators TIGER - WADE

WADE aimed at exploring underground and superficial water resources in arid and semi arid regions in Africa using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. SAR has a great potential due to its limited cost and high spatial resolution; the availability of an advanced technological tool for water resources detection and mapping can represent a significant improvement for sustainable water management. Specific project goals were to map permanent water-related human artefacts (foggara, wells, channels), to map natural seasonal water resources understanding their dynamics through multi-temporal analysis, to transfer advanced technologies and tools to the User.

Special attention has been devoted to map surface water bodies, wetlands and small superficial natural seasonal waters, including inundated vegetation, at a detailed spatial resolution (20 to 30 meters). This effort permit to collect information on limited water resources which are of paramount importance for biodiversity conservation.

Two vectorial products have been developed:

1. A layer of subsurface human-made water features, geometrically detectable by radar, searched over a ~ 400,000 km2 area. This was principally accomplished by exploiting the geometric regularity of emerged elements associated to the underground tunnels, such as wells, sinks etc.
2. A multi-temporal analysis of seasonal surface waters, aimed at understanding distribution and dynamics of these resources. This analysis has been carried out over a ~ 100,000 Km2 area. To understand seasonal natural water dynamics, 5 months a year for 3 consecutive years have been assessed, providing also a classification of these natural water resources according to their characteristics with respect to meteorological and land cover existing information.