ISAC

Information Service on Agricultural Change

 Partecipanti

Mappa

 Word cloud

Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.

 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Agricultural resources are in high demand to sustain the world’s growing population. In Europe, agriculture is regulated and monitored through the CAP and agricultural insurances are increasing in importance as an instrument for risk management. In the developing world droughts and other natural disasters impact vulnerable populations and lead to famines and starvation. The EC development policy and its emergency response mechanisms address these issues through actions that aim at reducing the occurrence and impacts. Agriculture and environment are both priorities for Europe’s GMES initiative.

Satellite images with a high temporal frequency (daily) but low spatial resolution (>250m) are frequently used for agricultural monitoring. However, since the early 2000, new high frequency, high resolution (<30m) wide swath sensors have become available.

The ISAC proposal intends to explore improvements of current Agricultural Services based upon such high frequency, high resolution data. It intends to expand the capabilities of LMCS and ERCS for what concerns the agro-environment.

ISAC proposes to develop and test feasibility of 3 services: 1. Core Mapping Service (CMS) on High Resolution Biophysical Parameters (ABP-CMS) 2. Core Information Service (CIS) on Drought stress (DS-CIS) 3. Core Information Service (CIS) on Agricultural change (AC-CIS)

Purpose of the ABP-CMS, in analogy to the BIOPAR-CMS of the LMCS, is to produce vegetation parameters (NDVI, fAPAR,…) with much greater spatial detail based on sensors like DMC. Purpose of the DS-CIS is to build synergy between vegetation indicators of high and low spatial detail in order to enhance the current capabilities of satellite-based drought information systems. Purpose of the AC-CIS is to analyse agricultural change taking global seasonal climate forecasts as well as satellite data into account.

ISAC services will be demonstrated and validated in East-Africa, Spain and Belgium.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Adverse weather events such as drought and excessive rains, storms and hurricanes cause heavy losses to farmers. An EU-funded project has provided support to European and African authorities to help farmers face disasters.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Agricultural insurance, including livestock and forestry, covers losses occurring from adverse weather and similar events beyond the control of farmers. Recently, the EU has been considering a possible integration of risk management in the Common Agricultural Policy. However, in countries like Africa, resilience after disasters is slow with the lack of adequate knowledge of cropping systems, affecting the livelihood of vulnerable populations.

Despite the differences between countries, there is an overall need for reliable information. Crop monitoring relies mostly on the use of satellite images with high temporal frequency (daily), but low spatial resolution (>250 m). The 'Information service on agricultural change' (http://www.gmes-isac.info/ (ISAC)) project proposed the use of high frequency and high resolution (<30 m) data from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation and Landsat-TM.

During the ISAC project, three services were developed. The first provides vegetation indices and biophysical parameters, such as the leaf area index and fractional vegetation cover with high spatial details. The high resolution biophysical parameters are used in a second service dedicated to assessing drought phenomena and related crop damage. The third service is focused on detecting short- and long-term changes in agricultural production.

Prototypes of the new services were demonstrated in Belgium, Ethiopia and Spain, representing areas with moderate to extremely high drought risk. Field campaigns were also organised in each of the test sites to thoroughly validate products. The three test sites were chosen to demonstrate the potential usage of the new services. More importantly, ISAC services were reviewed by potential end-users for future ingestion in the Copernicus services.

It is expected that the ISAC services will form the basis for setting-up paying downstream services together with end-users and in particular, with the insurers. Better information can be used for payments and guiding field visits. For example, when vegetation indices and biophysical parameters present anomalies, experts can be sent to assess the damage.