Session: Agriculture Monitoring
This scenario was prepared for a GEOSS Architecture Workshop
The scenario was developed and provided by Inbal Reshef, Department of Geography, University of Maryland, USA.
Regional Famine Early Warning Scenario
1. Summary
The risk of food supply disruption continues to grow as agricultural systems respond to the pressures of climate change, energy needs and population increases. Understanding and monitoring global agriculture production is therefore essential to combat short and long term threats to stable and reliable access to food.
Strategic investments in earth observations could revolutionize global agricultural production monitoring leading to improved management of our agricultural resources, helping to reduce risks of food insecurity.
In this scenario an area of potential famine due primarily to drought has been identified by the international community from a combination of field reports (of agricultural, socio economic and human conditions) and coarse resolution satellite monitoring.
Imagery is needed at moderate (30m) and fine resolution (1-5m) to understand the extent and development of the drought.
Based on the assessments made with the various field reports and imagery by the international community, decisions are made on mobilizing international food aid.
2. Context and pre-conditions
The actors are the various Famine Early Warning Systems e.g. GIEWS, FEWS, MARS FOOD, SADC DMC from the Agricultural Monitoring Community of Practice
The scenario assumes that the international agricultural monitoring community has identified a potentially major drought event which could lead to widespread human suffering. It is likely that this event will be in Africa.
Currently the agricultural monitoring community is hindered by the availability and difficulty of access to moderate (30m) and fine (1m-3m) resolution data from multiple on orbit systems. Improvements in automated data search across multiple systems and coordinated acquisition and near real time provision of data would greatly enhance food security monitoring.
3. Scenario Events
A potential famine event and region has been identified and satellite monitoring at moderate and fine resolution is needed. In the scenario the metadata catalogues of the moderate resolution (30m) class of instruments available from the international community e.g. Landsat, SPOT, IRS, CBERS, ASTER and fine resolution (1-5m) systems from the private sector, are automatically interrogated for acquisitions during the current growing season for the famine region and the availability (standard metadata) is sent to the community of practice. These data are placed on line for access and the community of practice is notified. New acquisitions from the sensors are scheduled for priority acquisition and the community of practice is notified upon their collection. The new data are made available on line for near real time download within 24 hrs of receipt. The data are obtained by the monitoring and are used in the decision making process to assist in decisions concerning food relief.