Abstract
Monitoring crop and rangeland conditions is highly relevant for early warning and response planning in food insecure areas of the world. Satellite remote sensing can obtain relevant and timely information in such areas where ground data are scattered, non-homogenous, or frequently unavailable. Rainfall estimates provide an outlook of the drivers of vegetation growth, whereas time series of satellite-based biophysical indicators at high temporal resolution provide key information about vegetation status in near real-time and over large areas. The new early warning decision support system ASAP (Anomaly hot Spots of Agricultural Production) builds on the experience of the MARS crop monitoring activities for food insecure areas, that have started in the early 2000's and aims at providing timely information about possible crop production anomalies. The information made available on the website (https://mars.jrc.ec.europa.eu/asap/) directly supports multi-agency early warning initiatives such as for example the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning and provides inputs to more detailed food security assessments that are the basis for the annual Global Report on Food Crises. ASAP is a two-step analysis framework, with a first fully automated step classifying the first sub-national level administrative units into four agricultural production deficit warning categories. Warnings are based on rainfall and vegetation index anomalies computed over crop and rangeland areas and are updated every 10 days. They take into account the timing during the crop season at which they occur, using remote sensing derived phenology per-pixel. The second step involves the monthly analysis at country level by JRC crop monitoring experts of all the information available, including the automatic warnings, crop production and food security-tailored media analysis, high-resolution imagery (e.g. Landsat 8, Sentinel 1 and 2) processed in Google Earth Engine and ancillary maps, graphs and statistics derived from a set of indicators. Countries with potentially critical conditions are marked as minor or major hotspots and a global overview is provided together with short national level narratives.
Highlights
Agricultural production follows strong seasonal patterns related to the biological life cycle of crops and rangelands and it is at the same time dependent on climatic drivers and on physical characteristics of the landscape
To match two different resolutions used in the warning classification system (1 km Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and 0.25° European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Rainfall estimates (RFE)), the coarser resolution data is resampled to the 1 km grid using nearest neighbour resampling
To define the mean growing season period we use the satellite-derived phenology computed on the long-term average of 10-day SPOT-VEGETATION NDVI time series
Summary
Agricultural production follows strong seasonal patterns related to the biological life cycle of crops and rangelands and it is at the same time dependent on climatic drivers and on physical characteristics of the landscape. The system makes available timely overviews of production anomalies at the global level as input to more detailed agricultural monitoring or food security assessments In this way, it complements the quantitative crop monitoring and yield forecasting analysis provided by MARS for Europe and its neighbouring countries and summarized in the MARS bulletins (Baruth et al, 2018). The expert-based assessment at national level targets 80 selected countries included the list of food insecure countries monitored by the GEOGLAM-CM4EW and additional countries where food security and rural development are target sectors of the European Development Fund It involves the analysis of the automatic warnings together in conjunction with additional information, in particular high spatial resolution remote sensing data, news from the press and a large set of maps, graphs and statistics generated by the ASAP system (see Section 4). The map of the current hotspot countries, a global overview and country reports that includes short early warning messages by MARS analysts are published on the ASAP Hot Spot web page (https://mars.jrc.ec.europa.eu/asap/)
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