The development of global monitoring system "Crop Watch" for the cereals in Northern Kazakhstan and Siberia

The Chinese system of global agricultural monitoring "Crop Watch" in the basic configuration works on the scale of individual states. The major grain producers in the world (30 countries) are included in monitoring. The system can be easily adopted for a single country or a region of interest. The crop condition monitoring, crop acreage estimation, crop yields forecast and volume of grain production are major performance with new methodologies and high accuracy. The development of the system for the cereals in Northern Kazakhstan and Siberia is assumed in two ways. The first is improving of the administrative scale by up-scaling from the local level, which is consider homogenous, to provincial level through aggregating approach, and to entire regional level. The second way is the development of methodology on satellite data processing. It planed to include the analysis of long-term changes of the cereals practice level for local, provincial and region scales, which will improve the accuracy of prediction schemes. The land surface temperature product from MODIS will be added in monitoring scheme, which will improve the water stress monitoring to help crop yield prediction.

North Kazakhstan and Siberia were chosen as the region of interest. This is one of the major grain-producing regions with similar climatic conditions. Region is detached from the major existing grain export routes but is relatively close to the Chinese market. In consideration of the plan are 7 provinces from Kazakhstan: West Kazakhstan, Aktobe, Kostanay, Akmola, North Kazakhstan, Karaganda and Pavlodar, with a total cropland size about 14 million hectares, and 10 administrative facilities from Russia: Saratov, Samara, Orenburg, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Tyumen, Omsk, Novosibirsk provinces, and Altai Krai and the Republic of Bashkortostan. Thus, the total area of monitoring will be more than 30 million hectares of arable land.

Project is funded by the international scientific-technical cooperation of Kazakhstan-China (grant: SK05-03).