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Dynamic global-scale crop and irrigation monitoring

Nature Food volume 4, pages 736–737 (2023)Cite this article

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The European Space Agency’s WorldCereal project enables high-resolution global-scale mapping of crop types and irrigation at low cost. Its continuation beyond the showcase year 2021 is needed to ensure high quality and timely data for food security monitoring and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Real-time crop monitoring is thus increasingly important, including for compensation related to climate-induced loss and damage, as envisioned during the last Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)1. Global food security is monitored regularly by initiatives such as GEOGLAM, spearheaded by the Group on Earth Observations, and the Agricultural Market Information System, which rely on accurate and up-to-date information on where major crops are grown and their agricultural productivity2. These agricultural monitoring systems, however, do not produce real-time pictures, as they rely on rather static information on the spatial extent of cropland, often produced for a past baseline year and at a coarse resolution, for example, 1 km (ref. 2), with the location of major crop types often based on downscaling of past national and subnational statistics3. Recent progress has since led to the production of several high-resolution cropland maps in near-real time, with more work needed in reconciling differences in area estimates due to both complex landscapes and definitional bias4,5. More dynamic crop-specific information such as on maize, cereals or active cropland is being added3,6.

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Fig. 1: Overview of an operational WorldCereal system.

References

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Acknowledgements

The work has received funding from the European Space Agency (ESA) WorldCereal project under the project No. 4000130569/20/I-NB. The views expressed in this manuscript are the authors’ only and do not reflect the views and policies of FAO on the subject matter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Linda See, Steffen Fritz, Myroslava Lesiv & Juan Carlos Laso Bayas

  2. Flemish Institute for Technological Research (Vito N.V.), Mol, Belgium

    Sven Gilliams, Jeroen Degerickx & Kristof Van Tricht

  3. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

    Giulia Conchedda, Jose Rosero & Francesco N. Tubiello

  4. Science, Applications & Climate Department, European Space Agency (ESA), Frascati, Italy

    Zoltan Szantoi

  5. Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Zoltan Szantoi

Authors
  1. Linda See
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  2. Sven Gilliams
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  3. Giulia Conchedda
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  6. Steffen Fritz
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  7. Myroslava Lesiv
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  8. Juan Carlos Laso Bayas
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  9. Jose Rosero
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  10. Francesco N. Tubiello
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  11. Zoltan Szantoi
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Correspondence to Linda See.

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See, L., Gilliams, S., Conchedda, G. et al. Dynamic global-scale crop and irrigation monitoring. Nat Food 4, 736–737 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00841-7

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