LPS25 POSTER SESSION – EO Africa – Continental Demonstrator LUISA: Lessons Learned from Scaling HANNP for Local to Continental Scales

At the ESA Living Planet Symposium 2025 in Vienna, LUISA will present a poster titled “EO Africa – Continental Demonstrator LUISA: Lessons Learned from Scaling HANNP for Local to Continental Scales”.

POSTER ABSTRACT:

The ESA EO AFRICA – Continental Demonstrator "Land Use Intensity’s Potential, Vulnerability and Resilience for Sustainable Agriculture" (LUISA) project addresses the development and application of the Human Appropriated Net Primary Production (HANPP) as an essential indicator for evaluating human impacts on carbon stocks. Such impact assessments are essential for global climate mitigation policymaking. HANPP quantifies the degree to which human activities appropriate or modify net primary production (NPP), which is the biomass plants produce through photosynthesis and that serves as the foundation of the food chain. This indicator comprises two primary components: harvested biomass, representing the portion of NPP used by humans for purposes such as food, fiber, timber, and bioenergy; and NPP foregone, referring to potential biomass lost due to land-use changes, including deforestation, urbanization, and agricultural expansion. By calculating HANPP, scientists gain insights into how human activities alter ecosystems’ capacity to generate biomass, with significant implications for biodiversity, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services. High HANPP values indicate substantial human-induced ecosystem changes that can strain the environment and limit resources for other species. The LUISA project ensures that the monitoring of HANPP is scalable and operational using cloud-agnostic and open-source computational frameworks. This approach facilitates the transition from research prototypes to operational systems, employing modular workflows that adapt to different cloud environments. Proven methodologies reinforce algorithm robustness, and close collaboration with end-users ensures the resulting Earth Observation (EO) products are practical and widely applicable. By integrating advanced EO technologies, scalable computing, and algorithmic innovation, the project overcomes traditional barriers to mapping and monitoring biomass flows at continental scales, supporting informed decision-making and sustainable resource management. The project focuses on creating a remote sensing-driven framework for HANPP monitoring across Africa, using case studies in Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda, and Ethiopia. This involves optimizing NPP estimates at high (20m) spatial resolution with the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically available radiation and weather data derived from Sentinel-2 and ERA5-Land. The optimized estimates are used to calibrate outputs from a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) to estimate NPP across Africa. Automated methods are employed to calculate human influence indicators for land uses such as cropland, grazing land, forests, and built-up areas, and these HANPP estimates are evaluated across agroecosystems representing diverse African contexts. The project extends these efforts to scale HANPP monitoring across the African continent in both space and time. This includes pixel-level computation of actual and potential NPP using calibrated DGVM models, the mapping of human influence indicators across land-use types at the continental level, and the benchmarking of results against a new dataset, HANPPcube. By addressing scales from local to continental, LUISA advances HANPP monitoring as an operational tool for understanding human impacts on ecosystems and fostering sustainable development throughout Africa.
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