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.
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.
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.