Facilitating the uptake of EO-derived information in sustainable development projects related to Agricultural and rural development

The EO4SD Agriculture and Rural Development project aims at demonstrating the benefits of EO-based geo-information products and services to support agricultural monitoring and management tasks, in particular projects and programmes of the Mulatilateral Development Banks (MDBs) such as World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, IFAD and Asian Development Bank which deal with land degradation, soil erosion, food security and irrigation systems management. The main objective of this Agriculture Cluster project is to demonstrate that the effectiveness of the MDB’s technical assistance interventions and financial investments in agriculture sector can be measurably enhanced by using EO-derived information to support large-scale crop area and type estimates (i.e. crop cover mapping and status assessment), irrigation and irrigation systems management (i.e. energy balance, water productivity and water stress), agriculture productivity assessment (i.e. yield estimation, ground water, precipitation monitoring), rural infrastructure investments planning and monitoring (i.e. households and transport networks mapping), Land Degradation Assessment (i.e. land use, rainfall, soil moisture, precipitation, fAPAR, NDVI indicators), and Environmental Impact Assessment (i.e. landscape level classification and change mapping including fragmentation, and agriculture commodities production impact on deforestation).