MARS Bulletin - Vol.19 - Special issue No. 1 - Crop monitoring in Morocco

Crop monitoring and yield forecast using CGMS is presented for barley, soft wheat and durum wheat in Morocco. The 2010-2011 crop season started with favourable confitions during the sowing period. The agroweather conditions were also positive during the winter and the begining of spring with significant and well distributed rainfall.JRC.DDG.H.4-Monitoring agricultural resource

MARS Bulletin - Vol.19 - Special issue No. 1 - Crop monitoring in Morocco

Crop monitoring and yield forecast using CGMS is presented for barley, soft wheat and durum wheat in Morocco. The 2010-2011 crop season started with favourable confitions during the sowing period. The agroweather conditions were also positive during the winter and the begining of spring with significant and well distributed rainfall.JRC.DDG.H.4-Monitoring agricultural resource

Wheat modelling in Morocco unexpectedly reveals predominance of photosynthesis versus leaf area expansion plant traits

Wheat is the staple food of 1.5 billion people worldwide and projected trends in global demand and productivity warn against food security risks over the next decades. Large-area crop monitoring and yield forecasting represent key issues to support agricultural policies, especially in developing countries. Among the existing monitoring systems, the most sophisticated are based on crop simulation models. Published reports of sensitivity analyses performed on different crop models show that parameters involved with leaf area expansion are often considered as the most relevant. Here we performed a multi-year spatially-distributed Monte Carlo-based sensitivity analysis of the models WOFOST and CropSyst for wheat simulation in Morocco. Due to the high number of sensitivity analyses to be performed, a 2-step procedure was adopted, with the Morris method used to identify parameters with a negligible effect and the Sobol' one applied on those remaining. Environmental and management information were derived from the European Commission MARS database. Our results show that parameters directly involved with photosynthesis played a major role: they explained more than 75% of the total output variance for CropSyst and more than 70% for WOFOST. Instead, parameters involved with the processes related to leaf area expansion resulted less relevant. The geographical patterns in terms of the relevance of parameters and processes shown by the same models under heterogeneous conditions could provide useful guidelines for driving breeders efforts towards specific plant traits, in the light of developing phenotypes suitable for specific conditions, e.g., varieties with a higher level of thermal adaptation in the Southern regions. This is the first time a multi-year spatially-distributed sensitivity analysis is carried out on two complex agro-ecological models.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource

Evaluating NDVI data continuity between SPOT-VEGETATION and PROBA-V missions for operational yield forecasting in North African countries

After 15 years, the SPOT-VEGETATION (VGT) programme reached the end of its life in May 2014 and was replaced by the PROBA-V mission. Exploiting the period of overlap between instruments, this study compares the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of two instruments from the point of view of the user interested in operational crop monitoring. The comparison is performed for Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, where NDVI is used to derive anomaly maps, temporal profiles and cereal yield forecasts. A relevant scatter due to unexplained unsystematic variability exists between anomaly values. A mismatch between anomaly classes is observed for 20 to 30% of the crop area. However, when the NDVI is averaged over cropland and administrative units to derive temporal profiles, the two data sources show a high agreement. Results for yield estimation comparison indicate an overall high agreement, and both the (null) hypotheses that the model predictions and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) in yield estimation are not different when using PROBA-V instead of SPOT-VGT cannot be rejected in all cases for Morocco and Algeria. On the contrary in Tunisia, where RMSE is lower using PROBA-V, the hypothesis of no difference in RMSE is rejected. These findings therefore indicate that yield estimation performances are not affected (Morocco and Algeria) or improved (Tunisia) by the source transition. Finally, despite the same nominal spatial resolution, the different spatial quality of the sensors was found to have an effect on yield estimation in areas characterized by sharp transitions between cropland and desert.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource