The use of cloud based imagery services for understanding landscape change in support of opium monitoring in Afghanistan

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Information on illicit poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is of critical importance to the opium monitoring programme of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The pattern of cultivation is constantly evolving because of environmental pressures, such as water availability, and social and economic drivers related to counter narcotics activity. Remote sensing already plays a key role in gathering information on the area of opium cultivation and its spatial distribution. The shift to cloud computing opens up exciting possibilities for extracting new information from the huge amounts of satellite data from long-term earth observation programmes. You will test the hypothesis that inter-annual and intra-seasonal changes in vegetation growth cycles are predictors of poppy cultivation risk. This will involve using emerging cloud based technologies for processing image data into accurate and timely information on vegetation dynamics relating to opium cultivation.