MISLAND-North Africa is an operational instrument relying on the international standards for reporting SDG 15.3.1 and technical approaches allowing the delivery of regular information on vegetation cover gain/loss to decision makers and environmental agencies at the first place.

The core-service provides land degradation indicators for six North African Countries at two levels:

At the regional level(North Africa action zone) where low and medium resolution EO are used.

At the pilot site level, where(customized indicators) can be developed, using medium resoultion data(landsat time series imagery and derived vegetation indices, combined with different satellite-derived climate data) QGIS plugin for OSS Land Degradation Monitoring Service (MISLAND)

The offline system (GIS Plugin) will have three modules:

• input module,
• computation module and
• output module.

The input module will enable the user to load ancillary data, e.g. rainfall, vegetation cover, wind speed data etc., required by the service model to compute various outputs.

The computation module will implement the models and algorithms, while the output module will enable the user to download the result. Our assumption here is that the output will be a Geotiff map for the area of interest.

It’s important to note that the same functions available through the web service will be available through a GIS plugin, where more advanced analysis can be done. This will overpass data sharing issues and allow users who do not have continuous/stable internet connection and want to perform advanced analysis

Below is an illustration of flow of information from one resource to another within the QGIS Plugin architecture

An end-user executes a module/script within the plugin eg. forest fires. The plugin sends this request to the backend API which creates an execution and execution logs for this instance as well as requests the script ID from the Postgresql database. The database returns metadata of the script back to the backend API which then sends the the request to google earth engine python library on which script to run. Execution logs are then recorded in the database as the script runs from start to finish.

On successful completion of the execution, the final result(tiff file) is exported by google earth engine to Google Cloud Storage bucket as an object. The end-user is then able to thereafter download and visualize the result via the plugin onto QGIS. This data remains available for download by the end-user for upto 7 days.

To install from within QGIS, first launch QGIS, and then go to Plugins in the menu bar at the top of the program and select Manage and install plugins.

Then search navigate to Install from ZIP and upload the MISLAND plugin zipfile. If your plugin has been installed properly, there will be a menu bar in the top left of your QGIS.

MISLAND QGIS Plugin documentation can be found at MISLAND DOCS

Datasets used in running of processing scripts in MISLAND QGIS Plugin are as listed below:

More info on data sources and data coding visit https://misland.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Introduction/data.html

Special appreciation to the Trends.Earth. Conservation International. Available online at http://trends.earth .2018. for providing input on the implementation of the SDG 15.3 and LDN indicators in MISLAND-North Africa, on the UNCCD reporting process, and also provided early input and testing of the tool.

The project also acknowledges the contribution of national and regional stakeholders; Algerian Space Agency(ASAL), ASAL (Algeria), DRC (Egypt), LCRSSS (Libya), CRTS (Morocco), AL-Aasriya University of Nouakchott (Mauritania) and CNCT (Tunisia) for the national level and CRTEAN and CRASTE-LF for the regional level

Contact the MISLAND-North Africa team with any comments or suggestions. If you have specific bugs to report or improvements to the tool that you would like to suggest, you can also submit them in the issue tracker on Github for MISLAND-North Africa.

If you think you have found a bug, report your issue to our issue tracker so the developers can look into it.

When you report an issue, be sure to provide enough information to allow us to be able to reproduce it. In particular, be sure to specify:

What you were doing with the plugin when the problem or error ocurred (for example "I clicked on 'Download Results' and got an error messaging saying describe what the message said". The operating system you are using, version of the plugin are you using, and version of QGIS that you are using If you are emailing about an error or problem that occurred when downloading results, tell us your username, and the task start time that is listed in the download tool for the task you are referring to If the error occurred while processing data with the plugin, tell us the location you were analyzing with the tool (for example: "I selected Argentina from the dropdown menu"). If you used your own shapefile, please send us the file you used. If you got a message saying "An error has ocurred while executing Python code", send us either the text of the message, or a a screenshot of the error message.

Also, send us the content of the MISLAND log messages panel. To access the MISLAND log messages panel, select "View", then "Panels", then "Log Messages" from within QGIS. Copy and paste the text from that panel and include it in your issue report. It will make it easiest for us to track things down (as their will be fewer log messages) if you do this after first starting a new QGIS session and immediately reproducing the error.

MISLAND is free and open-source. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later.

This site and the products of MISLAND are made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The boundaries and names used, and the designations used, in MISLAND do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by OSS, or its partner organizations and contributors.