Hands-on usage of CoRE stack datasets and APIs for social-ecological planning

The CoRE stack is a digital public infrastructure that has brought several geospatial datasets and pre-computed analytics together to build a comprehensive social-ecological understanding of a place. The datasets and outputs are hosted freely on the CoRE stack platform and accessible via APIs. Participants will be taken through a process on how to use the APIs to work out several relevant use-cases. A few such examples are listed below:

- Find the most drought sensitive villages in a tehsil: CoRE stack APIs can be used to pull pre-computed data of villages and watersheds in a tehsil of the time-series of cropping intensity since 2017, indexes like NDVI, drought and non-drought years, etc. These dataframes can be quickly analyzed to find which villages or watersheds show the highest sensitivity to droughts. Further data of the socio-economic situation of villages drawn from the census can be used to prioritize targeted drought protection programmes.

- Do an impact assessment of watershed development works: Similarly, to evaluate how successful a watershed development programme has been, the data pulled through CoRE stack APIs can be used to identify counterfactual watersheds based on co-variates like terrain, soil, drought occurrence, etc. and compute the difference in difference of outcome variables (cropping intensity, NDVI) between post-treatment and pre-treatment years in the treated and counterfactual watersheds.

We will also facilitate participants to install a local instance of the CoRE stack backend on their machines, and to build simple pipelines that can run locally installed geospatial libraries to create new data layers and analytics, or invoke Google Earth Engine APIs to trigger layer computations remotely and download the computed outputs, and add these layers to the backend.

Participants will thus gain a strong understanding to use the CoRE stack and contribute to it, as well as learn several geospatial programming tactics to use GEE and other platforms.

Participants should have Internet access, platforms like QGIS pre-installed on their machines, programming environments like Jupyter notebooks, familiarity with the Google Earth Engine platform, and should have received CoRE stack API keys after having completed a registration process on the CoRE stack dashboard.