To prevent aggravation of existing poverty in semi-arid savannas of Sub-Saharan Africa, a comprehensive concept for the sustainable adaptive management and use of these ecosystems under probable climate change is needed. SAVMAP, a research initiative initiated with help of the CODEV Seed-Money program in 2014, contributes to such need by developing an innovative land monitoring strategy that is based on near real-time ultrahigh-resolution photographic imaging (NURI) via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) developed at EPFL (Sensefly/Pix4D) and tested in semi-arid savanna in the Western Kalahari in Namibia (Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve) as well as in the Namib Desert (Gobabeb Research and Training Centre). SAVMAP-2014 was a full success not only providing proof of concept of the NURI approach in semi-desert and desert environments, but also generating valuable data that fuelled collaborations with researchers of the OPTIMASS (see 5.6) and MicroMappers (see 5.7) projects. SAVMAP-2014 also attracted international media coverage (CNN, National Geographic). SAVMAP-2015 wants to build on this success by a) intensifying efforts to publish and acquire research funding, b) acquiring "updated" aerial imagery for research on change detection (degradation/rehabilitation of vegetation cover with time), and c) intensifying research collaborations as a valuable "remote-sensing" partner with expertise in acquisition and analysis of very high resolution remote sensing data of semi-arid savanna. With the recently accepted research funding schemes on sustainable land-use in Namibia, OPTIMASS and SASSCAL (both funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), SAVMAP represents a timely opportunity for EPFL to enter research collaboration on ecosystem resource management in Sub-Saharan Africa.