Introduction

Agriculture production constitutes the foundation of the economy in many countries. In Asia, agricultural population densities on agriculture lands are among the highest in the world. The demand of grain is increasing as the population increases and the living condition is gradually improving. Therefore it needs to monitor the condition of the agricultural production in order to timely provide the decision maker of the national agricultural policy with precise information about crop production, crop acreage and crop condition to improve the efficiency of the agricultural policy.

Regarding the global environment aspect, the knowledge of crop growing areas is also important to land cover and land use and climate change. The fast changing international environment in terms of food supply and climate change strengthen the need for developing global agricultural monitoring systems that would improve agricultural risk management, agricultural monitoring and food security. Remote sensing is able to provide spatial and temporal distributed information on crop growth. With the rapid development of Earth resource satellites which are providing various remotely sensed imageries, remote sensing is playing a critical role in developing a global monitoring system, but there are still some technique issues to be addressed。 The application of new emerging satellite data is providing an opportunity to enhance this capability.

So, the proposed workshop will provide an occasion to global scientists, policy makers and satellite data providers to present the advance of agriculture monitoring technology in particular in tropical area, and help strengthen the network for the agriculture community. Working language is English.

The two-day workshop will include invited speeches and contributed oral and poster presentations.  All abstracts will be published in the workshop proceedings. Selected papers will be solicited for publication in International journal of Digital Earth and Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing.

We are now inviting proposals for sessions. Each session will consist of 4-6 papers. The session proposer will serve as session chair and can invite speakers for the session, subject to the approval of the program committee. Session proposals should reach the program committee by March 1, 2010. The session proposal should consist of a title, synopsis, and proposed invited speakers (if applicable).

Suggested sessions

• Mapping crop land using optical and microwave remote sensing data
• Monitoring crop growth condition
• Crop yield estimation
• Retrieval of crop biophysical properties
• Data Assimilation applications in agriculture
• Geographic Information System techniques applications in agriculture
• Agriculture resources survey and planning

Keynote speakers

• Prof. Wu Bingfang, Institute of Remote Sensing Application, CAS
  Speech: A method for estimating crop yield and its applications
• Prof. Chlris Justice, University of Maryland
  Speech: An overview of the  GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring Task
• Dr. Cornelis Anthonius van Diepen, Wageningen UR – Alterra Netherlands
  Speech: Monitoring crop growth conditions and forecasting regional crop yield and crop production in Europe
• Prof. Guo Huadong, Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, CAS
  Speech: Monitoring crop growth conditions and forecasting regional crop yield and crop production in Europe

Co-Organizers

• Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• China Agricultural University
• Hong Kong Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (HKSPRS)
• Group on Earth Observations
• International Society of Digital Earth
• Jiangxi Normal University

Sponsors

Supporting Organizations

• Institute of Remote Sensing Application, Chinese Academy of Sciences（IRSA, CAS）
• Institute of Agricultural Remote Sensing & Information Application, Zhejiang University (IARSIA, Zhejiang University)
• China Association of Agriculture Engineering(CAAE)
• China Agricultural University(CAU)
• Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CEODE, CAS)
• National Center for Remote Sensing of China (NCRSC)
• China Meteorological Adminstation(CMA)
• China Center for Resources Satellite Data and Application (CCRSDA)
• South China Agriculture University(SCAU)
• GuangZhou Institute  of  Geography, CAS
• National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture (NERCITA)
• GEO Agriculture Monitoring Community