Large area crop monitoring and yield forecasting

This resarch line deals with the development of systems for in season crop monitoring, for supplying early warnings (e.g., unusual disease pressure, extreme weather events) and management support (e.g., agrochemical distribution, irrigation), and for providing timely estimates of yields and product quality.
These systems are developed by considering the peculiarities of cropping systems under specific agro-climatic and social contexts, as well as the spatial scale considered. The core of the Cassandra monitoring and forecasting systems is always represented by a dedicated modelling solution (or by a variety of solutions in case of multi-model simulations), with the possibility of assimilating remote sensing information.

Cassandra developed monitoring/forecasting systems
- for rice in Jiangsu (China) and wheat in Morocco (multi-model simulations) within the EU-FP7 project E-AGRI;
- for wheat in Hebei (China) during a collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS);
- for rice in Senegal and Sierra Leone (partially supported by the FIRST project SCENARICE);
- for sugarcane in Brazil;
- for rice in northern Italy (high resolution, also targeting qualitative aspects of productions and management support) within the EU-FP7 project ERMES.
Cassandra is currently contributing to the improvement (extreme weather events) of the crop monitoring and forecasting system of the European Commission (EU-FP7 project MODEXTREME) and developed most of the model components used since 2014/15 by the European Commission for the MARS monitoring/forecasting system.