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SAR workshop supports agricultural monitoring
Canada hosted an international GEO workshop and training course in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada on the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to support agricultural monitoring from 31 October 31 – 5 November.
Over 115 participants from the international agricultural monitoring community, as well as experts and leaders in space-based agricultural applications development and SAR satellite operating organizations attended this event. A two-day pre-workshop capacity building training session was also held for some 70 remote sensing agricultural, land cover, and forest monitoring experts. The workshop was followed by a one-day meeting of the GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring Community of Practice.
The workshop identified and communicated the information and operational needs of the agricultural user community to facilitate coordinated access to Earth observation data. Recent advances in synthetic aperture radars (SARs), such as the sensors on the RADARSAT-2 satellite, provide new opportunities to use Earth observation data for key applications including agricultural, forestry and coastal zone management, particularly in regions that are prone to persistent cloud cover.
The outcomes of the workshop include a set of recommendations and next steps to overcome scientific, operational and capacity development challenges in the areas of agricultural productivity, water availability, and land use and management. These recommendations, plus incorporation of the results from a pre-workshop SAR survey, will form the basis of a final report to help leverage resources from stakeholders to advance the use of SAR in developed and developing countries. A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing will also be published in 2010 to highlight the science outcomes made in presentations and posters produced for the workshop.
The Community of Practice meeting, which followed the workshop, planned for a series of international pilot sites to facilitate the integration of remote sensing into operational monitoring platforms. The 30+ participants discussed the implementation of the GEO Joint Experiment for Crop Area Monitoring (JECAM) as a key step in the development of the agricultural monitoring system of systems. It was agreed that an international agricultural monitoring test site coordination office will be setup to help facilitate data collection, improve science, and share best practices for the international test sites – potential hosts are being considered.
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Participants of the GEO Workshop on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to Support Agricultural Monitoring |
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