We are very proud to announce that the European Space Agency has selected the VITO led consortium to start working on the WorldCereal project. WorldCereal, in support of global agricultural monitoring, is officially kicked off early June 2020 and will run for two years.
The main objective of WorldCereal is to develop – building on existing community initiatives, open and free EO sources, new algorithms, ICT infrastructure and reference datasets – an open-source, efficient, agile and robust EO based system to timely monitor the global cropland extent at field scale.
The system will be able to create:
- a global seasonally updated annual cropland extent map
- differentiate between irrigated and rainfed fields
- produce a maize and wheat crop type map
To achieve this objective, the consortium will be supported by the WorldCereal Champion users
- GEOGLAM, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Flagship Initiative on Global Agricultural Monitoring,
- the G20 Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) (Policy/Economics/Trade)
- the FAO with its Global Early Warning and Information System of Food and Agriculture (GIEWS) department and the Land and Water department (Humanitarian/Early Warning/Water use efficiency
- GEOSYS, an Urthecast company (agricultural business)
VITO (Belgium) is the prime contractor of the World Cereal consortium together with CS SI (France), eLeaf (The Netherlands), GISAT (CZech Republic), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria), University of Strasbourg (France), University of Valencia (Spain) and Wageningen Environmental Research (WENR) (The Netherlands).