UMD Geographers Bring Expertise to Workshop on Monitoring Agricultural Production and Land Use in Latin America

By Alyssa K. Whitcraft

In late September, five members of the Department of Geographical Sciences traveled to Buenos Aires, Ar- gentina to participate in a four day workshop focused on monitoring agricultural production and land use/land cover (change) in Latin America. The workshop was hosted by INTA, Argentina’s “Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria”, and co-organized by Chris Justice and Inbal Becker-Reshef of UMD. It was an in- ternational workshop attended by scientists representing public, private, and academic agricultural research organizations from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Par aguay, and Mexico, as well as by scientists from Eu- rope, North America, and Asia who are a part of the GEO Agriculture (Group on Earth Observations) Commu- nity of Practice. The workshop was held within the framework of a new GEO Agriculture initiative called GEO- GLAM (GEO Global Agriculture Monitoring) which was ado pted by the G-20 in June of 2011 and is co-led by Chris Justice with partners from the USDA, the European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC), China, France, Canada and the GEO Secretariat in Geneva.

The goals of the workshop were to discuss the state of the art of agricultural monitoring in Latin America, to share methodologies used in agricultural monitoring applicati ons, to identify gaps and priorities specific to Latin America, and particularly to strengthen connections between agencies and organizations that share overlap- ping research objectives and themes. The workshop was conducted in both English and Spanish as facilitated by two very capable translators who provided an opport unity to bridge an otherwise challenging language gap.

Drs. Chris Justice, Eric Vermote, Matt Hansen, I nbal Becker-Reshef and graduate student Alyssa Whitcraft have been conducting agricultural monitoring research and/ or providing scientific & programmatic guidance for the GEO Agriculture Task and the GEO-GLAM initiative for several years. Each UMD Geographer presented agricultural related research and activities, and were reciprocally enriched through insight gained on cropping practices and agricultural monitoring methodologies employed throughout Latin America. During the workshop, it was reiterated that remotely sensed data must be relia- bly & freely available, interoperable, and of high-quality in order to be adopted by regional and national agencies for operational agricultural monitoring. This fact is at the core of the GEO-GLAM initiative: data quality, accessibility, and continuity are paramount in encouraging the use of EO for operational agricultural monitoring.

The final day of the workshop involved a field trip to the rolling Pampas of Argentina, where attendees visited ag- ricultural fields that grow wheat, corn, or soy, as well as pasture lands. Local agricultural experts accompanied the trip and discussed their cultivation practices. This unique opportunity provided insight into the processes that many remote sensing scientists see in the data, but are not always capable of explaining by EO data alone, highlighting the key linkages between local knowledge on field level processes and regional or global scale anal- yses performed remotely using EO data.

Agricultural research has been central to the Department of Geographical Sciences for many years, a tradition that the GEO Agriculture task and its GEO-GLAM initiative is now strengthening and continuing through inter- national collaboration and coordination with strong support from UMD. The outcomes of the workshop will be summarized in a joint synthesis paper outlining the lessons learned and the path forward to generate an inter- national network of EO-based agriculture monitoring. More information on the meeting can be found at: http:// sepa.inta.gov.ar/sites/default/files/imagenes/workshop/index.htm , and more information on GEO-GLAM can be found through this press release: http://www.earthobservations.org/documents/pressreleases/pr_1111_geo_glam.pdf

Eric Vermote, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Matt Hansen, Alyssa Whitcraft, and Chris Justice taking in the agricultural landscape of the Argentine rolling pampas, outside Buenos Aires.