PA34A-09:
The Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) Initiative: Developing methods and best practices for global agricultural monitoring
Wednesday, 17 December 2014: 5:36 PM
Catherine Champagne, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, National AgroClimate Information Service, Ottawa, ON, Canada, Ian Jarvis, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Agroclimate, Geomatics and Earth Observation Division, Ottawa, ON, Canada, Pierre Defourny, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium and Andrew Davidson, Agriculture Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Abstract:
Agricultural systems differ significantly throughout the world, making a ‘one size fits all’ approach to remote sensing and monitoring of agricultural landscapes problematic. The Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) was established in 2009 to bring together the global scientific community to work towards a set of best practices and recommendations for using earth observation data to map, monitor and report on agricultural productivity globally across an array of diverse agricultural systems. These methods form the research and development component of the Group on Earth Observation Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM) initiative to harmonize global monitoring efforts and increase market transparency. The JECAM initiative brings together researchers from a large number of globally distributed, well monitored agricultural test sites that cover a range of crop types, cropping systems and climate regimes. Each test site works independently as well as together across multiple sites to test methods, sensors and field data collection techniques to derive key agricultural parameters, including crop type, crop condition, crop yield and soil moisture. The outcome of this project will be a set of best practices that cover the range of remote sensing monitoring and reporting needs, including satellite data acquisition, pre-processing techniques, information retrieval and ground data validation. These outcomes provide the research and development foundation for GEOGLAM and will help to inform the development of the GEOGLAM “system of systems” for global agricultural monitoring. The outcomes of the 2014 JECAM science meeting will be discussed as well as examples of methods being developed by JECAM scientists.
