My Community, Our Earth: Fellowships for Geospatial Technologies and Biodiversity in Africa

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The Association of American Geographers (AAG) will support the participation of four students competitively selected from US universities to engage in intensive collaboration with interdisciplinary teams of counterpart students and their mentors in Africa. Teams will explore how geographic technologies and expertise may be applied to local and regional biodiversity challenges. The proposed activities build upon two important new AAG-run programs within Africa: a capacity building program for African scientists managed by AAG with funding from USAID/NASA and collaboration with African counterpart institutions receiving support from the US State Department under the Geospatial Technologies for Sustainable Development program. The project will permit a cohort of undergraduate and graduate researchers to acquire meaningful international research and collaboration experiences in geographic technologies and biodiversity through participation in programs that currently do not support wide US participation. Students will receive mentoring support, travel, living expenses, and stipends to attend a training workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, a three-month research activity with African student mentor teams, and ongoing virtual collaborations over the course of one year.Intellectual Merit. Geographic Information Science (GISc) provides a valuable set of technologies, methods and perspectives of demonstrated utility in addressing challenges to biodiversity conservation within the context of its complex relationship to other socio-economic phenomena, its increasingly data intensive and spatially explicit nature, and emerging digital access to georeferenced biological data as well as new software tools and services that create novel research opportunities for ecological analysis, predictive modeling, and synthesis.The AAG?s assessment on the state of GIScience for sustainable development and the identification of fundamental geospatial datasets in Africa reveals a strong need for more extensive educational and professional development collaborations, including both events and networks, among US and African institutions to help strengthen the capacity of the geospatial community to transform these datasets into knowledge.Broader Impacts. This proposed project seeks to support NSF OISEs mission to develop global scientists and engineers in terms of linkages to research programs of other countries, particularly developing countries, where often counterpart resources are typically scarce. The program will provide support for new scientists and engineers by involving US graduate and undergraduate students with opportunities to gain early career international professional experience. The program will disseminate workshop materials and project results broadly. Team project reports and white papers will form the basis for additional research products, including conference exhibits and summary publications to be disseminated via international venues, including at United Nations (New York), AfricaGIS (Uganda), and AAG (Washington, DC) conferences in 2009-2010.This project is supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering through the EAGER (EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) mechanism.