Remote Sensing | Timon Weitkamp | No Worries, Just Maps

Coffee Sector in Colombia

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Updated sector study commissioned by Wageningen University & Research as part of a series on commodity supply chains in Colombia.

Palm Oil Sector in Colombia

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Updated sector study commissioned by Wageningen University & Research as part of a series on commodity supply chains in Colombia.

SmartCane BV — Satellite Monitoring for Sugarcane

Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2024 I co-founded SmartCane BV with a straightforward question: if you can map smallholder irrigation across Mozambique from a satellite, why can’t you reliably monitor a large sugarcane estate?

Turns out you can, but sugarcane is trickier than it looks. Different varieties, different planting dates, ratoon cycles, cloud cover in tropical regions — simple vegetation indices don’t cut it. You need time series, and you need to understand how sugarcane actually grows before the numbers mean anything.

SmartCane builds monitoring tools for the industry: crop health tracking across estates, growth stage and harvest timing support, and field-level reporting that doesn’t require the client to know what a GeoTIFF is. The pipeline runs on Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope imagery, processed in the cloud.

My role covers the technical side — data pipelines, classification models, product development — and the client conversations. It’s the kind of job where you spend a morning debugging a cloud masking issue and an afternoon explaining what NDVI means to an estate manager. Both matter equally.

Mapping Diverse and Dispersed Smallholder Irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa through Remote Sensing

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

PhD thesis completed at Wageningen University under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Charlotte de Fraiture, Dr. Ir. Gert Jan Veldwisch, and Dr. Ir. Poolad Karimi.

Saterra Labs — Landscape Intelligence for Sub-Saharan Africa

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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 .

The Generalisation of Machine Learning Models for Predicting Irrigated Agriculture in Heterogeneous Landscapes: An Examination of Model Transferability in Mozambique

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This manuscript is currently under review.

Towards Transparent Reporting in Remote Sensing-based Mapping of Irrigated Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa: Development of a Reporting Framework

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This manuscript is currently under review.

Coffee Sector in Colombia

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sector study commissioned by Wageningen University & Research as part of a series on commodity supply chains in Colombia.

Palm Oil Sector in Colombia

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sector study commissioned by Wageningen University & Research as part of a series on commodity supply chains in Colombia.

Evaluating the Effect of Training Data Size and Composition on the Accuracy of Smallholder Irrigated Agriculture Mapping in Mozambique Using Remote Sensing and Machine Learning Algorithms

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mapping Irrigated Agriculture in Fragmented Landscapes of Sub-Saharan Africa: An Examination of Algorithm and Composite Length Effectiveness

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

SmartGrain Feasibility Study

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Technical report examining the feasibility of using remote sensing technologies for grain crop monitoring and yield estimation.

Technical and Policy Reports for FASIMO: Remote Sensing Methodology and Irrigated Agriculture in Mozambique

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Series of technical reports developed for the FASIMO project in 2022:

Remote sensing methodology to measure irrigated agriculture in Mozambique
Area of irrigation in Mozambique and importance of FLID
The importance of farmer-led irrigation in Mozambique

SmartCane Feasibility Study

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Technical report examining the feasibility of using remote sensing technologies for sugarcane monitoring and management.

Space for Time - How Do Peatland Vegetation Patterns Develop through Time?

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Master’s thesis completed at Wageningen University and Research as part of the MSc Geo-Information Sciences program.