Dedicated regional use cases
WorldCereal Phase I findings highlighted the substantial interest in utilizing our crop type maps for a large range of applications as well as the significant gap that still exists in providing such global and accurate products in an operational way. User engagement is critical to address this. To this end, dedicated regional use cases will be set up in collaboration with the agricultural monitoring community (e.g. GEOGLAM, JRC, NASA Harvest, FAO, WFP) to improve and demonstrate WorldCereal’s capabilities.
Our selection of regional use cases will be guided by a set of criteria including:
- Challenging Regions: We will prioritize regions where crop classification is a challenge, resulting in low accuracy/confidence.
- Ground Data Deficiency: Regions lacking reference ground data present opportunities where additional ground data and collaborative partnerships can significantly boost the performance of the WorldCereal products and system.
- User-Driven Impact: Regions that are proposed by end-users with a clear commitment to collecting ground data, have an interest in integrating WorldCereal products, and ultimately realizing their potential impact within their own systems and decision making.
The development of user-centric regional use cases plays a crucial role in fostering engagement with the user community, facilitating on-site data collection, enhancing the system’s global, national, and local modeling capabilities, and ultimately showcasing the tangible value and impact of WorldCereal.
Regional WorldCereal products to support food security analysis
The envisioned use cases encompass a broad spectrum, including:
- Enhancing crop yield and production: enhancing national/subnational/local production forecasting and estimation activities.
- Dynamic Area Changes: Monitoring and understanding changes in crop extent due to conflicts or policy shifts.
- Crop Health Assessments: in-season assessments of crop conditions based on existing WorldCereal products, that can enable timely responses to mitigate risks.
- Damage Assessment: In the face of extreme weather events or conflicts where default WorldCereal products can aid in rapid damage assessment, and disaster management.
Aside from the regional use cases set up in collaboration with key users, the consortium will also respond to up to six ad-hoc requests from ESA to generate regional WorldCereal products to support food security analysis. Generated products will be validated according to best available and independent reference data. This activity represents yet another opportunity for collecting dedicated ground reference data and locally improving the WorldCereal classification model suite.