Space for environmental resource management and geodata for agriculture and water

Abstract

Extended Significant increase of environmental issues in the recent decades produce serious threats to the global community. Nowadays, there are numerous efforts to cope and minimize the impact of those environmental problems, mainly conducted by the local governments. Remarkably, the advancement of satellite and geospatial data are currently gaining important contribution in the decision-making process as a part of environmental impact countermeasures [1]. The important role of space and geospatial data agencies to manage information related to environmental resources and their dynamic processes affecting the community, particularly for disastrous events, are now highly acknowledged [2].The Netherland Space Office was established in 2009 and are now responsible to develop and implement Netherland Space Program in providing space application for science, economy, and society. The office, in collaboration with the European Commision and the European Space Agency (ESA), as well as the other European Union (EU) member states, conduct programs inside and outside the region [3]. The Netherland Space Office and the other EU state offices is now working together in the Copernicus Programme in monitoring the earth [4,5]. The Copernicus is designated to manage data from multi-satellite observation in Sentinel program, particularly for land and atmosphere monitoring, climate, marine environment, emergency management, and security [4,5,6]. Currently, The Copernicus Programme provides 20 years of free satellite data, and is planned to maintain data from about 30 EU satellites.The increasing need of satellite and geospatial data also is also responded well by private sector initiative in this field [7,8]. This condition, in turn, is expected to improve the number of monitoring intensity as well as reduction of the operational cost. It also potentially yields new information by the increasing number of combinations between the type of sensors mounted in the satellite, and the range of bands to be captured. In the case of Copernicus, the variation sensors and spectral range of different satellite maintained by them currently provides a lot of information related to earth dynamics, natural resources, land cover changes, and disaster events [6,9].It should be noted that the global challenge due to increasing world population, food production, and climate change become central issues that highly affect smallholder food producers. Although various information could be derived from satellite and geospatial data, the current global and regional information systems are not yet supporting to the smallholder level [10,11]. The farmers often obtain outdated information about their environment, particularly related to weather and water resources. On another hand, many traditional knowledges now become less/not effective in managing the farm, particularly due to climate change [12]. This condition suggests the need of better informed decisions at the farmer level. As an initiative, Netherland Space Office execute Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW) program to improve food security in developing countries using satellite data since 2014 [10,11]. G4AW currently running 23 projects in 14 developing countries. The program not only providing basic information related to crop management (e.g. providing land cover & soil maps, and irrigation advices), but also provides more localized weather forecast, yield forecast, pest & disease warning, flood & drought warning, as well as providing micro insurance and risk profiling. The implementation of this program is expected to improve the crop productivity in the target areas, as well as increasing the coping capacity of the smallholders against increasing climate variability [13].