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News - 29/08/2015

ERMES meets AfricaRice

On August 27th ERMES researchers had a technical meeting with Sander Zwart from the Africa Rice Center, an ERMES international end-user. Preliminary results on rice crop detection and phenological mapping for the Senegal River Valley were discussed.

Senegal River Valley systems (Senegal and Mauritania) (a), red polygons represent areas equipped with irrigation infrastructure by 2014 (AfricaRice), a zoom in the North west part in Senegal Saint-Lois region (b) and (c) a detail of the intensive irrigated systems close to the Lac de Guiers.

Senegal River Valley systems (Senegal and Mauritania) (a), red polygons represent areas equipped with irrigation infrastructure by 2014 (AfricaRice), a zoom in the North west part in Senegal Saint-Lois region (b) and (c) a detail of the intensive irrigated systems close to the Lac de Guiers.

According to AfricaRice, it is of the great importance to track the dynamics of rice cultivation in the last 10 years. The researchers from IREA-CNR are therefore performing time series analysis of MODIS data to retrieve information on cropping intensity (1 or 2 rice seasons), variations regarding agricultural practices (switch from wet to dry season for rice cultivation) and crop establishment dates. These results will ultimate related to meteorological measurements to analyze the climatic risk of temperature extremes during the growing seasons. Both cold and heat extremes frequently lead to yield losses. Improved knowledge on risks support farmers to take better decision on planting and choice of rice varieties.

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CNR-IREA and AfricaRice researchers that attended the 27th August ERMES meeting.

Discussion highlighted the good performances of ERMES phenological monitoring algorithms, which allowed to clearly highlight the strong increase of rice cultivation in the Senegal Dry season in the last years, as shown in the figure below.

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Statistical distribution of rice crop establishment dates estimated from MODIS data on the Senegal River valley for year 2003 (left) and 2014 (right) using the Phenorice Algorithm. The figure highlights the strong increase of rice cultivated areas in the spring season occurred in the last years (Preliminary results).