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Kick-off Meeting of the STFC/NSFC Newton Agri-Tech Joint Fund Project: Sentinels of Wheat (SoW) was Held Successfully in Beijing
What has led you personally to want to do projects like "Sentinels of Wheat"?
The focus of my research is monitoring vegetation using Earth Observation (EO). The drive is the belief that we can help people monitor, understand and appreciate their interactions with the global environment by providing rigorous, independent measurements of the status, dynamics and history of terrestrial vegetation and associated flows of energy, carbon, water and nutrients.
I have built a focus around developing and applying new methods in this area, with a key emphasis on moving the field from loose empirical correlations to making use of more widely applicable models based on physics and biophysics. This has proved successful for global application in several areas, including the NASA MODIS BRDF/albedo and burned area products, which have provided operational monitoring for nearly 20 years now. More recently, we have improved our ability to combine data from multiple sources, using appropriate models and data assimilation methods.
EO has long shown great promise for applying such approaches to the vital area of agricultural monitoring and yield prediction, but a major limiting factor has been the inappropriate scale and frequency of observations. Pragmatic approaches, such as EU MARS or the current Chinese CHARMS national monitoring system, essentially rely on broad timing information from EO, scaled with models and crop area estimates. The opportunities for this have changed dramatically with the recent advent of the EU/ESA Sentinel satellites. In this work, we have been able to show that we can apply our advanced, generic methods to perform the monitoring over vast areas, at a subfield scale, even in heterogeneous cropping systems such as in China. This has been the culmination of many years of theoretical and practical work from all project partners, working together to achieve the objective of a better, more reliable, robust and accurate monitoring system and the aim of improved food security.
Although there is further work to do, we are now able to provide a practical system that integrates the data and models to provide vital crop information that can start to be more widely disseminated, is applicable globally, and of relevance at all scales from sub-field variations for individual farmers to national, regional and global food security. It is an exciting time to be involved in this area of the application of our research听and to be doing this through joint international projects.
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