Dr. Gary Watmough leads an interdisciplinary group investigating the role that geospatial data and techniques can have in improving our understanding of rural livelihoods and wellbeing and how it can be used to help decision making and geographic targeting of development assistance and government resources.

Currently, we focus a lot of our efforts on examining how satellite data could be used to help fill in the data gaps that prevent the socioeconomic focused Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as SDG1 (No Poverty) targets being met. My work with the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action focuses on linking SDG1 and SDG2 and Guyo (Jameel Observatory Director) and I were interviewed about our work in east Africa for The Boma Podcast in late 2022: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1539610/11823955  another podcast with Prof Alan Duncan, Guyo Roba and myself is available here. I was interviewed for the Edinburgh Space Data Capital Podcast in 2020 and it can be found here.  A lot of what i do is working with very-high spatial resolution satellite data and trying to identify proxies for rural livelihoods.

PhD Students currently in the Geospatial Livelihoods Group

• Philipp Barthelme joined in October 2021 working on the SENSE CDT Funded project exploring the impact of humanitarian mine clearances on tropical forest carbon storage –  Philipp will work with myself and Iain Woodhouse at UoE, Dominick Spraklen from Leeds Uni and CEOBS (The conflict and environment observatory) will be the Case Partner.
• John Mutua joined the group in September 2021 working on the EPSRC DPT funded project titled:  Supporting Climate Smart Agriculture: Estimating livestock diets in support of improved estimation of greenhouse gas emissions for the livestock sector – a case study in East Africa –  John is supervised by myself along with Alan Duncan and Simon Fraval from the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security and Tim Robinson from The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.
• Michael Renfrew joined the group in September 2022 working on the SENSE CDT funded project exploring methods to estimate livestock numbers in East Africa using Machine Learning and Satellite Data. Michael is based in the School of Mathematics, Bruce Warton is his primary supervisor with myself and Alan Duncan as co-supervisors.
• Saeeda Gouhari joined the group in March 2023 working on the E4 DTP funded project looking at how monitoring and evaluation of overseas development assistance could be supported using Earth Observation and Geospatial Data. NIRAS-LTS are the CASE Partner on this project and the supervisory team is myself (primary), Matthew McConnachie (NIRAS-LTS), Alan Duncan.
• Reason Mlambo joined the group in October 2023 working on a SENSE CDT funded project looking at Spatiotemporal poverty mapping using earth observation data and deep learning in Africa. He will be co-supervised by Sohan Seth in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and Vikki Houlden in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds.
• Seán Ó Héir joined the group in October 2023 working on a SENSE CDT funded project looking at Explainable Population Estimation Using Deep Learning from Satellite Imagery. His main supervisor is Sohan Seth in Informatics

Future PhD projects:

• advertised in late 2023

Past (completed) PhD Projects: