Hakim Abdi
Nomination for WWF's "Environmental Hero" award

In mid-September I got an email that said “ditt arbete med Birding Therapy som en av de nominerade av Årets Miljöhjälte i kategorin biologisk mångfald” (your work with Birding Therapy is one of the nominees for this year’s Environmental Hero award in the biodiversity category"). At first I didn’t know what to think and thought it was a phishing/malware type of spam. But then it sunk in that this is real, and it’s difficult to put into words how I felt. I didn’t think that anyone was paying attention to the small side project I started to get more people, particularly underrepresented groups, out into nature and birding.

Hakim Abdi
TEDx talk on “Satellites for Everyone”

My TEDx talk is now available on YouTube. The basic premise of the talk is that when you put all the recent advances in perspective, it results in a democratization of data on one hand, and science on the other. It means that anyone with a computer and a decent internet connection can have access to satellite data, process them using open source methods and extract information for their own use. This not only helps accelerate the rate at which scientific discoveries are made but also makes knowledge sharing and international development more equitable and inclusive.

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Behind the Paper: Comparing machine learning algorithms using Sentinel-2 data

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The field of machine learning is moving fast, and it seems that new fancy algorithms coming out every week. Sometimes, it is confusing to figure out which algorithms are best suited for which purpose. This is particularly the case when it comes to land-use and land-cover classification using multidimensional satellite imagery because most of the new algorithms are tested with either binary or uni-dimensional data.

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Behind the Paper: Combining science and art to understand environmental change

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A couple of years ago, my colleague and friend Emma Li Johansson approached me with an interesting proposition. Her idea was that the combination of remotely-sensed land cover and and land use change maps and participatory paintings of people’s perceptions of land change might provide useful information in understanding the drivers of change. She didn’t have to say any more because I was sold. It was a solid idea with an innovative interdisciplinary workflow and high potential to provide valuable outcomes.

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Behind the Paper: Testing a new satellite-derived vegetation index in a new biome

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The last chapter of my PhD dissertation was published earlier this year in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. From conception to publication, this paper took about two-and-a-half years of work. It signifies the end of my PhD era, so to speak. The idea came from my supervisor, who suggested that testing the relatively new Plant Phenology Index (PPI) in semi-arid biomes would be a worthwhile cause because its only been evaluated in the boreal biome.

Downward spiral of conflict and famine in Somalia is due to the absence of good governance, not climate

Somalia is mostly dry and semi-arid with the exception of few areas of greenery in the northern mountains or the riverine agricultural fields in the south. Since the acceleration of violence in the late 1980s that propelled it into civil war, two things have been occurring in Somalia on a more or less regular basis: conflicts and famines, and both have been linked, in one way or the other, to climate change