The global monitoring for food security project: Using envisat meris and ASAR for monitoring agriculture in Africa

The Global Monitoring for food Security project (GMFS) is an European Space Agency (ESA) funded project and is one of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Services Element. The project provides earth observation based services and encourages partnerships in monitoring Food Security and related environmental processes in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to assist stakeholders, nations and international organizations to better implement their policies towards sustainable development. GMFS partners, such as the EC JRC, FAO, WFP and collaborating institutes at national level in Africa indicated that estimates of planted areas is a major gap in estimating agricultural production. Since the project startup in March 2003, GMFS has been using ENVISAT data in order to estimate the extent of cultivation in the project countries in Africa. Activities started in Senegal and were extended, upon advice of the partners, to cover other countries, including Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sudan and Malawi, countries with a known history of food insecurity. Total planted area is estimated through the analysis of multi-temporal series of ENVISAT ASAR and MERIS data, integrated with other optical images, as available, and fieldwork carried out with local partners at the time of the image acquisitions. In close collaboration with ESA, GMFS is setting up near real time processing chains in order to process large amounts of ENVISAT data to get the required result in a timely manner. Depending upon data availability, the extent of cultivation is estimated at two levels, firstly for localized areas, covering the main agricultural zones in the considered country, using high resolution ASAR AP data and high resolution optical data, and secondly at country level integrating also multi-temporal MERIS FR data. The generated products are a result of an iterative process whereby local expertise is assimilated. Aiming at sustainability and the local take up of GMFS products in the normal assessment process of agricultural production by the partners, GMFS considers the involvement of local experts as a key element. To that effect expertise is exchanged on satellite technology and local agricultural conditions through workshops and training sessions.