Saterra Labs — Landscape Intelligence for Sub-Saharan Africa

I’ve been with Resilience BV since 2019, and Saterra Labs is the name for the geospatial and hydrology work we do within it. The focus is sub-Saharan Africa — Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, and wherever the work takes us.

Most of our clients are development programmes: NGOs, development banks, conservation projects. They need to understand a landscape before they can do anything useful in it. How much water is available? Is the forest cover changing? Where are farmers actually irrigating? These sound like basic questions. In regions where weather station networks are thin, irrigation registries don’t exist, and the last land survey was done decades ago, they’re genuinely hard to answer.

A lot of the work is satellite time-series analysis — tracking changes in vegetation, water, and land use over time. Hydrological modelling fills in the gaps where satellite data alone isn’t enough. Most of it runs in Google Earth Engine, R, and Python. A chunk of my PhD was directly about methods for this: how to map irrigation in fragmented landscapes where it doesn’t show up in official statistics, and how to be honest about the limitations of what remote sensing can and can’t tell you.

The goal is to give a programme team something they can use — a clear picture of their landscape, not a 200-page technical report that sits on a shelf.

More at saterra.earth.