Research
Publications & Research
Academic thesis, technical reports from UN-funded projects, and open-source geospatial tools published for the global research community.
Academic
M.Sc. Thesis
The Use of Remote Sensing for Monitoring Agricultural Products in the Gezira Irrigation Scheme, Sudan
Gezira Sulama Projesi'ndeki (Sudan) Tarimsal Ürünlerin İzlenmesinde Uzaktan Algilama Kullanimi
This study investigates the application of remote sensing and GIS techniques for monitoring agricultural water productivity in the Gezira Irrigation Scheme — the world's largest contiguous irrigation project (8.4 M ha, central Sudan). Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) were applied to multi-temporal Sentinel-2 10 m imagery for crop classification and wheat yield estimation. Integration of FAO WaPOR Level 2 and Level 3 satellite products improved water productivity accuracy assessment by 15% versus prior approaches, identifying spatial patterns of water use inefficiency guiding targeted management interventions across three administrative offices and three consecutive growing seasons. Two QGIS plugins and a Python pipeline were released as open-source tools for the geospatial community.
Field Research
Technical Reports
Project deliverables produced under UN-agency and INGO contracts — water accounting, crop mapping, and hydrological assessments.
Seasonal Water Productivity Assessment Report — Gezira Irrigation Scheme
2023–2024Hydraulics Research Center (HRC), Sudan
O. Ibrahim · 5 seasonal reports
Series of seasonal monitoring reports documenting WaPOR-based water productivity at administrative-office scale, delivered to HRC Sudan management for irrigation planning.
Water Productivity Baseline Report — Gash Irrigation Scheme
2021IFAD / Gash Agricultural Development Project
O. Ibrahim, HRC Sudan Team
Comprehensive baseline water accounting using the FAO WA+ framework for the 300,000 ha spate irrigation system in Kassala State, Sudan. Delivered to IFAD Project Coordination Unit.
GIS-Based Crop Inventory and Monitoring Protocol — Gezira-Managil Complex
2019–2021HRC Sudan / Gezira Board
O. Ibrahim, HRC Sudan
Multi-temporal satellite-based crop inventory for the 2.2 million hectare Gezira-Managil complex, replacing manual survey methods and establishing a replicable annual monitoring protocol.
Flood Inundation Mapping and Risk Assessment — South Darfur
2020ZOA International
O. Ibrahim, ZOA Team
HEC-HMS/RAS hydrological modelling and Sentinel-1 SAR flood extent mapping for 6 wadi catchments in South Darfur State. Intervention recommendations achieving 40% flood risk reduction.
Nile River Gauging Station Site Selection — Sudan–Egypt Border Reach
2020HRC Sudan / Bilateral Nile Waters Programme
O. Ibrahim, HRC Sudan
Multi-criteria GIS spatial analysis identifying 12 priority hydrological gauging locations along the 400 km Nile reach. Combined DEM analysis, HEC-RAS hydraulic modelling, and GPS-RTK field surveys.
Open Source
Software & Tools
QGIS plugins, deep learning pipelines, and monitoring dashboards released for the global geospatial community on GitHub.
wapor-water-productivity
QGIS plugin automating FAO WaPOR water productivity analysis, seasonal report generation, and map production. Designed for irrigation scheme monitoring by practitioners without programming background.
GeoAccuRate
QGIS plugin implementing the Olofsson et al. (2014) area-adjusted accuracy assessment framework for land-cover and crop maps. Automates confusion matrix, user/producer accuracy, and confidence interval calculation.
GCN-Crop-Classification
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) framework for crop type mapping from Sentinel-2 multi-temporal imagery. Achieved 99.9% overall accuracy on Gezira test dataset. PyTorch implementation with full training pipeline.
crop-classification-deep-learning
End-to-end deep learning pipeline for multi-class crop classification from Sentinel-2 time series. CNN + LSTM architecture capturing both spectral and temporal crop phenology signatures.
Merowe-Dam-Water-Quality
Sentinel-2 multi-temporal water quality monitoring for Merowe Dam reservoir — turbidity, chlorophyll-a, and CDOM index mapping using empirical band-ratio algorithms and in-situ calibration.
Sudan-Flood-Disaster-Management
GIS-based flood disaster risk mapping and management framework for Sudan. Integrates Sentinel-1 SAR flood detection, population exposure analysis, and infrastructure vulnerability scoring.
pansharpening-toolkit
Python toolkit implementing multiple pansharpening algorithms (Brovey, Gram-Schmidt, IHS, PCA) for fusing high-resolution panchromatic with multispectral satellite bands using Rasterio.
gezira-lens
Interactive geospatial web dashboard for Gezira Irrigation Scheme monitoring. Real-time WaPOR layer visualization, seasonal comparison, and water productivity trend analysis via Google Earth Engine API.
TerraDiff
LiDAR-based 3D terrain change detection — compute before/after elevation difference maps (DEMs of Difference), volumetric change estimation, and automated report generation from point cloud inputs.