UN Division for Sustainable Development

Case Study Detail Record

Organization type:	Government

Name of Ministry/Agency:	Federal Planning Bureau

Country:	Belgium

Name of Focal Point:	Christian Vanden Bilcke, Nadine Gouzée

Initiative Title:	Global Agricultural Monitoring systems by integration of earth observation and modeling techniques (GLOBAM)- “STEREO” programme

Internet links:

Scope:

Status:	Ongoing

Timeframe:	Start: End:

Lead Institution:	PPS Science Policy

Stakeholders/Partners:

Relevent issues:	- Food security and sustainable agriculture - Risk-mapping, remote-sensing, modeling, crop-forecasting and other methods

Objectives/Challenges:

The overall objective of the project is to fill the gap between the current state of the art for local crop monitoring and the wide-scale operational system requirement.
The overall research strategy is to adapt, integrate and test advanced methods for the different steps of the proposed crop monitoring system, i.e. croplands mapping and crop area estimation, EO monitoring, crop modeling and, assimilation of the EO-derived information. These developments will be completed on 3 large sites of 300 x 300 km distributed in Northern Europe, Africa and Asia. In each site, a calibration area of 60 x 60 km (typically a SPOT scene) will serve to tune the classification process, the retrieval algorithm and the crop model while their respective performances will be assessed over the 300 x 300 km site thanks to large validation survey. The overall performances of the system will be then compared to existing operational systems and, finally alternative robust indicators will be designed and tested.

Lessons Learned:

A major gap exists between the remote sensing operationally used and the current scientific state of the art in EO crop monitoring. There is a lack of relevant field data over large areas, and these data are very much needed to gain a better understanding of potential improvements of the operational systems.

Policy Options:

To develop an integrated approach providing area and crop production estimate by combining satellite remote sensing and crop modeling in a quantitative and physically-based approach.

A conceptual research effort will attempt to develop more robust indicators of the crop production.

Summary:

Nowadays, food security and crop production variability become a major concern. Moreover, in spite of major technological and methodological Earth Observation (EO) improvements observed since the late 1990’s, very little change has been observed in the operational systems.

The performances of the proposed approach will be assessed for various agro-ecological environments thanks to extensive ground truthing and benchmarked with regards to existing operational systems. The robustness of the performances will be specifically investigated as it becomes more and more critical in a context of increasing inter-annual variability of meteorological conditions and of rapid change in emerging countries.