Dr Andries Potgieter of the University of Queensland is using Australia's ecosystem observatory system TERN to generate remote sensing data to estimate grain cropping area and produce regular seasonal outlooks for sorghum and wheat.
When faced with the high impact of climate variability, advanced knowledge of likely crop size and its geographical distribution help industry make strategic decisions and avoid market volatility within Australia and globally.
Commodity forecasting is an essential part of decision-making processes in Australian agricultural businesses and government agencies. However, the lack of real-time data on cropping area meant that producing accurate and timely predictions of specific production across regions and seasons wasn’t possible until recently.
Thanks to the open satellite data delivered by TERN, Dr Andries Potgieter and his colleagues at The University Of Queensland’s Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation have bridged this information gap and developed a holistic approach to determining specific crop production estimates.
Andries’s remote sensing techniques also provide vital information on trends in land use patterns across regions and seasons and are provided to both federal and state government agricultural departments and used in monitoring, planning and risk mitigation.
Dr Andries Potgieter's seasonal outlooks for sorghum and wheat are published via QAAFI’s website and also directly provided to both federal and state government agencies where they are used to more accurately and objectively determine crop productivity and to determine the spatial impact and magnitude of drought on-farm productivity in exceptional circumstances declared areas
Source: Read the full story here.
About TERN: Australia’s Land Ecosystem Observatory system TERN measures key terrestrial ecosystem attributes over time from continental scale to field sites at hundreds of representative locations and openly provide model-ready data that enable researchers to detect and interpret changes in ecosystems.
