Assistance for software development (Global Forest Resources Assessment Platform)

Details

Mission and objectives

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) contributes to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda through its Strategic Framework by supporting the transformation to More efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agri-food systems, for Better production, Better nutrition, a Better environment and a Better life, leaving no one behind.. The Resource Mobilization and Private Sector Partnerships Division (PSR) leads and coordinates the mobilization of voluntary contributions (currently 70 percent of FAO's budget) in support of the Organization's strategic priorities. PSR manages FAO's relations with resource partners, strategically matching partners' interests to those of the Organization, and supports the negotiation of approximately 800 trust fund agreements per year. It mounts marketing analysis and campaigns around global development opportunities, provides market and business intelligence and positioning services to management as well as resource mobilization capacity development to decentralized and headquarters offices. PSR also oversees and coordinates results reporting to ensure accountability to resource partners.

Context

The Forestry Division (NFO) has been supporting countries to develop their national capacity to collect, analyse and report forestry data for decades. The need for up-to-date forest resources data is becoming increasingly important, as it is crucial information to develop national forestry policies and management actions as well as for a wide range of international reporting needs (e.g. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment - FRA). The role of Global Forest Resources Assessment Team (FRA) is to collect, synthetize and disseminate country specific data on forest resources, their management and uses. The on-line FRA data entry, reporting and dissemination platform was developed in 2018 and it has been received extremely well by the countries’ In a recent user survey, they have expressed their wish to see further development of the Platform into an easy-to-use and interactive data visualization and dissemination functionalities. Furthermore, FRA has been requested to further work on the set of geospatial tools that allow the countries to access and use latest freely available remote sensing data and products. These expectations can be met through integration of geospatial functionalities to the FRA Platform and by developing customized interface for data visualization, download and reporting.

Task description

Under the overall direction of the Senior Forestry Officer/Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) Team Leader, the online volunteer will help us with the following duties with respect to - developing - testing - documenting the integration of Google Earth Engine APIs to visualize produced layers to a web client. The platform is a react-node application written using TypeScript, CSS, React, Redux and Node for backend purposes. It displays web maps with google maps APIs. We need assistance to add more features to the tool, such as menu-items, toggling functions, interactive response mechanisms and more. Furthermore, it will be necessary to deploy the model on an online server (we have one) and run it remotely.