Agriculture monitoring using Earth observation from space and in situ measurements: JECAM Ukraine activities

Efficient global agriculture monitoring requires appropriate international coordination in order to develop and validate Earth observation (EO) products for different regions and cropping system. This problem is addressed within the Joint Experiment of Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) initiative which aims to develop monitoring and reporting protocols and best practices for a variety of global agricultural systems.

Ukraine is actively involved into JECAM, and a JECAM Ukraine test site was officially established in 2011. The following problems are being solved within JECAM Ukraine: (i) crop identification and crop area estimation [1]; (ii) crop yield forecasting [2]; (iii) EO products validation.

Three case study regions were selected for these purposes: (i) the whole Kyiv oblast (28,000 sq. km) indented for crop mapping and acreage estimation; (ii) intensive observation sub-site in Pshenichne which is research farm from the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine and indented for crop biophysical parameters estimation (iii) Lviv region for rape-seed identification and crop rotation control.

The above mentioned agriculture monitoring problems are being solved within several international projects. They are:
• GEO-GLAM: regional forecasts of winter wheat yield based on EO data, crop growth and meteorological models.
• SOAR-JECAM project on “SAR parameters optimization for crop classification”. This project is based on the Radarsat-2 quad-polarized images and consists in optimization of SAR parameters (polarization, incidence angle, beam mode etc) to provide timely and economically efficient crop maps/area estimates for Ukrainian landscape. Quad-pol SAR data is used along with optical images for crop mapping.
• ESA Sentinel-2 for Agriculture project (participation as a “Champion User”). JECAM Ukraine test site is being observed with SPOT-4 and RapidEye satellites every 5 days. The collected images will be then used to simulate Sentinel-2 images for agriculture purposes. JECAM Ukraine is responsible for collecting ground observation data for validation purposes and providing user requirements for Senstinel-2 agriculture related products.
• FP7 ImagineS. JECAM Ukraine is responsible for collecting and processing ground measurements of biophysical parameters retrieval such as LAI, FAPAR, and FCOVER. These data will be used for validating global EO products.

The presentation will provide an insight on the general methodology used within these projects, the results achieved so far and challenges, and future planned activities.

References.
[1] Kussul N., Skakun S., Shelestov A., Kravchenko O., Gallego J.F., Kussul O. “Crop area estimation in Ukraine using satellite data within the MARS project,” 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 22-27 July, 2012, (IGARSS), pp. 3756-3759.
[2] Kogan F., Kussul N., Adamenko T., Skakun S., Kravchenko O., Kryvobok O., Shelestov A., Kolotii A., Kussul O., Lavrenyuk A. “Winter wheat yield forecasting in Ukraine based on Earth observation, meteorological data and biophysical models,” Int. J. Appl. Earth Observ. Geoinf., vol. 23, pp. 192-203, 2013.