Agriculture: Targets

The 10-Year Implementation Plan sets out the following two-, six- and ten-year targets for guiding the agriculture-related work on GEOSS:

2-Year Targets

• Facilitate - with relevant users at regional, national and local level - definition of user needs for agriculture, rangelands, forestry and fisheries in terms of Earth Observation data and information, as well as mechanisms to keep users informed.
• Advocate and facilitate existing initiatives that regularly provide updates of land cover data at 1:1,000,000 scale; use agreed ISO standard to initiate land cover mapping activities at 1:500,000.
• Facilitate regional training in land cover classification and the assimilation of existing data sets in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
• Facilitate the use of agriculture, forestry, and fishery production statistics to be exploited at pixel level.
• Advocate the adoption and use of geostationary satellite data (e.g. Meteosat Second Generation) in food-insecure regions.
• Facilitate establishment of a basis for the continuity of high resolution optical and radar satellite observing networks (5-30 m).
• Facilitate production of a map of the World’s irrigated agriculture areas, and the establishment of a monitoring programme among users.
• Advocate the development of on-time monitoring and information systems for significant and extreme events such as fire, forest conversion, and forest concession management.
• Facilitate the development of courses to demonstrate the usage of Earth observation data and products in developing countries.

6-Year Targets

• Advocate the development and improvement of the analytical tools and methods for agriculture risk assessment, and establish common standards and formats.
• Advocate support for the completion of the World soil and terrain database (SoTer) at a resolution of 1:1 million.
• Advocate support for the completion of land degradation and desertification assessment in drylands (LADA).
• Facilitate provision of regularly validated global land cover product at 1:500,000.
• Facilitate the role of satellite data in monitoring and maintaining a global farming systems database.
• Facilitate the establishment of operational linkage of Earth Observation data to geospatially referenced production and use statistics. This should cover crop agriculture, livestock, forestry and freshwater fisheries.
• Facilitate the continuity of high-resolution imagery for monitoring logging concessions in areas with high biodiversity concentrations.
• Advocate operational on-time monitoring and information systems introduced for significant and extreme events such as crop yield and crop water stress.

10-Year Targets

• Facilitate, with identified partners, the production of a comprehensive and validated global products suite production capability for land cover in higher resolution (e.g. 1:250,000) and land use in moderate resolution (e.g. 1:500,000).
• Facilitate the creation of global databases and assessments of irrigated land, water availability for agriculture, land degradation, forest conversion, and aquaculture expansion. Define process for data supply for updates.
• Facilitate conversion of all statistics and associated sub-national socio-economic data and environmental information to pixel format with known accuracies for cross linkage with satellite data.
• Facilitate on-time monitoring and information systems for significant and extreme events such as areas of land degradation and desertification.
• Produce an assessment of the effectiveness of delivery of GEOSS capacity building activities in the agriculture, forestry, and fishery sectors.