During these last months of 2021 the WorldCereal Consortium has finalized the validation of the large scale demonstration, the last step before the global demonstration of the products. To test the robustness and scalability of the algorithms and the system, the large scale demonstration had to be performed on 1.5M km² spread over three continents covering different agricultural environments and practices. In collaboration with our user community and based on independent criteria like, number of seasons, wheat and maize producing areas, type of agriculture etc., we selected 5 large areas in Argentina, Spain, France, Ukraine and Tanzania. For these countries, the seasons for 2019 were processed and validated. The team presented and demonstrated the products, how they are created, how they can be displayed in the system and how the system works, during the User Workshop at which more than 20 external users from different organizations were present.
Outcome of the review and validation
The external users were provided with preliminary access to the system, to test refence data upload, visualization of the system and have a closer look at the visualization. Feedback on this was collected during the WorldCereal Prototype Review Meeting, which was held on 07/12/2021. The largest part of this meeting was spent on the validation of the different WorldCereal products. For all 5 large scale demonstration areas the cropland, active cropland, and crop type classifiers performed very well and are exceeding the set requirements of 80% for cropland and 70% for crop type. The cropland classifier is on average above 90% and crop type above 80%.
The need for extra in situ data
However it also became clear that extra in situ data is needed for more detailed validation. The system still has different classifiers, e.g one for winter wheat and one for winter cereals, but at this moment the WorldCereal team doesn’t have enough reference data outside of Europe to really validate performance of the winter wheat classifier vs the winter cereal classifier. Feel free to upload any kind of geospatial located in situ crop type information to the reference data and join the GEOGLAM in situ data working group, so we can built together a global reference database for agricultural monitoring.
Towards the WorldCereal global demonstration
The WorldCereal team will now start processing the first seasons for the global demonstration and continue the work with the champion users to integrate WorldCereal products in their use cases. So stay tuned for more news and updates in 2022.