Base cartography for land and water management in Sub-Saharan Africa

Base cartography at proper scale for land and water management is rarely available in Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Despite the massive presence of international cooperation programs and projects carried out in various LDCs, a low budget is usually allocated for base data retrieval, which could be helpful for a wide range of on-site actions. A food security project in Burkina Faso, aiming at increasing the agricultural production through supporting farmers’ unions, is herein used as a case study. In this framework update cartography at large scale was needed in order to plan Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) interventions at catchment scale. However, best existing official maps, dated 1984, were at 1:50.000 scale, which is a highly coarse detail level to intervene at large scales. Data at higher resolution were available at the national cartographic institute, obtained from aerial surveys performed in the last decade. Aerial imagery allowed then to perform feature extraction over the areas of interest, thus updating the existing cartography and making it suitable for land and water management planning.