WorldCereal @ ESA Living Planet Symposium

We're counting down to the ESA Living Planet Symposium which will take place on 23-27 May in Bonn, Germany.

 

Join us @ Living Planet Symposium

The symposium focuses on how Earth Observation contributes to science and society, and how disruptive technologies and actors are changing the traditional Earth observation landscape.

The ESA WorldCereal team, developing an open-source, efficient, agile and robust EO based system to timely monitor the global cropland extent at field scale cannot be missed here!

Last year, the WorldCereal team has finished the validation of the large scale demonstration. Now, we're going into the last straight line to the first seasonal global demonstration of the products. 

Join our WorldCereal presentations and training sessions at ESA's Living Planet Symposium!
Discover and learn!

Our experts are waiting for you to inform you and to gain  your feedback.

 

Oral sessions

MONDAY 23/5

1. WorldCereal: dynamic crop mapping at the global scale
(part of session A3.04.1 Agriculture: regional to global monitoring)

  • Time: 14:45 - 15:00
  • Room: Geneva
  • Speaker: Dr. Kristof Van Tricht - VITO Remote Sensing
  • Description: 
    The growing world population and increasing weather extremes pose a serious threat to food security. To meet the requirements set by SDG2 Zero Hunger, we need more than ever a timely and global view on crop conditions. To do so, we need a good understanding understanding of where these crops are planted. Satellite remote sensing has nowadays become the most important data source to automate the mapping of agricultural areas and identification of crop types. Existing initiatives are however often characterized by one or more of the following limitations: (i) they provide only a one-time product (ii) they do not generalize well across space and time; (iii) they do not explicitly account for local growing seasons; (iv) they do not scale well in cloud environments.
    Within the ESA WorldCereal project, all these limitations are addressed in order to build the first global classification system that can produce seasonal crop mapping products at field scale within one month after the end of the growing season.
    The focus products of WorldCereal are: (i) 10m annual cropland extent maps, generated at the end of the major agricultural season; (ii) 10m seasonal wheat and maize maps; (iii) 10m seasonal active cropland maps; (iv) 10m seasonal active irrigation maps.

2. WorldCereal Seaonal Updated Global Crop Mapping (The WorldCereal System overview)
(Agoria session)

  • Time: 17:25 - 17:50
  • Room: Agora GEMINI
  • Speaker: Sven Gilliams & WorldCereal Consortium
  • Description: 
    During this session the experts of the WorldCereal team will be demonstrating the opensource ESA WorldCereal platform and presenting the global product. The do's and don'ts of setting up a global agricultural monitoring system will be discussed as well as the global validation approach. The use of the different products will be demonstrated through a specific use for GEOGLAM.

WEDNESDAY 25/5

1. EWoC open-source system for generating global WorldCereal products by using Sentinel 1, Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8
(part of session C5.02 Big EO data platforms)

  • Time: 9:15 - 9:30
  • Room: Santiago del Chile
  • Speaker: Aurélien Bricier & Alex Grosu - CS Group
  • Description: 
    The global agricultural monitoring requires a solution to an increasingly complex computational problem. Therefore, high performance computing became a critical resource and that is why the need of a processing cluster arose. The WorldCereal project delivers an open-source EWoC system which automatically ingests and processes Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 time series in a seamless way to develop an agro-ecological zoning system and disseminate high added value products to the users through the visualization portal using the geoTIFF COG format.
    The EWoC system is a demonstration of an operational, open-source, cloud-based processing platform from which other future projects can benefit through its many reusable components.

Trainings

THURSDAY 26/5

1. WorldCereal: training session 1 - Reference Data Module

  • Time: 9:00 - 10:30 and 10:40 - 12:10
  • Trainers: Hendrik Boogaard (WENR), Arun Pratihast (WENR), Santosh Karanam (IIASA)
  • Room: H-1-05
  • Description:
    The European Space Agency (ESA) funded WorldCereal aim is to produce global maps of cropland extent, crop type and irrigation. Current data repositories are unable to supply globally harmonized reference data for model training and product validation. To solve this problem we inventoried, collected and harmonized reference data from different sources leading to an unique community-based open harmonized reference data repository at global extent. The objective of this session is to present the repository and associated harmonization protocols. The session will include a practical exercise to harmonize data, explore the reference data module of WorldCereal and strengthen the relationships within the data sharing communities.

2. WorldCereal: training session 2 - EO Agricultural Processing Module 

  • Time: 15:40 - 17:40
  • Trainers: Aurélien Bricier (CS Group)
  • Room: H-1-05
  • Description:
    The main objective of this training session is to demonstrate how the WorldCereal system can be installed on a Cloud server and launched to automatically generate the map products for given a geographic region and period. The first half of the session will focus on the use of the processing chain while the second one will focus on how to deploy and configure the processing chain on the Cloud. The session will be organised in the form of demonstrations.