Region:

Africa

• Botswana - Village Flood Watch: The Village Flood Watch project, which was completed in 2002, was designed to help establish an early-warning system for potential flooding events by adding or upgrading six gauging stations to near real-time capabilities and providing training on hydrologic runoff modeling.
  
  
• Cameroon: USGS personnel are part of a team working to mitigate the buildup of carbon dioxide in Lake Nyos.
  
  
• Ethiopia: Over the past several years, USGS scientists have been assisting Ethiopia in development of its water resources by providing expertise in regional ground-water studies and by providing training in ground-water methods.
  
  
• Mali and Senegal: The USGS has been working to improve agricultural practices that will increase the amount of carbon sequestered in soils.
  
  
• Morocco: The USGS is engaged in geological and geochemical mapping in several areas.
  
  
• South Africa: USGS maintains a seismometer as part of the Global Seismic Network.
  
  
• Southern Africa: The National Mapping Discipline (NMD) has been developing current and historic remote sensing data sets to evaluate the effects of recent flooding in southern Africa (principally in Mozambique) and to mitigate future flooding. Effort has also been focused on developing a flood early warning system in southern Africa.
  
  
• West Africa: The USGS is working with several West African countries to monitor desertification and land use changes.
  
  
• General activities In Africa: The USGS is providing Geographic Information System (GIS) support for the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) project on sustainable tree crops. It is also augmenting the Africa Data Dissemination Server as a portal for Africa data by adding data and standardizing digital geospatial data collection methods. As part of the Famine Early Warning System, the USGS supplies data that can be used to provide early indications of potential threats to food security in Africa.