International workshop on satellite agromonitoring «Joint Workshop on Information Needs in Crop Monitoring» was held on October 22-23, 2015 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC EC) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs UNOOSA were symposium organizers and sponsors. Symposium was supported by European Copernicus program and GEOGLAM initiative of GEO group. The Space Research Institute NAS Ukraine and SSA Ukraine was define as a local workshop coordinator.
Representatives of Ukrainian government, international and national experts in satellite agromonitoring met at the workshop. Informational needs, available technical solutions and possible funding sources were discussed during workshop.
Representatives of the European Union in Ukraine, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, the European Space Agency, the GEOGLAM program , the European research centers and Institutions and experts in the area of satellite monitoring of the Eastern Partnership countries participated in the workshop. State Space Agency of Ukraine, Ukrainian State Service of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre, Ukrainian Hydrometeorological center, Institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine, representatives of leading educational institutions and private companies participated in workshop from Ukrainian side.
Current status and development trends of satellite monitoring were presented by European participants. European Space Agency was represented by Benjamin Koetz who is responsible for data processing systems development within Copernicus program. In the report «Copernicus Space Segment for Agriculture» he payed participant's attention on agricultural monitoring capabilities of European satellites. As was presended by Benjamin Koetz, modern satellites produce big amount of data (the «Big data» problem) and developing of modern methods of Data science and Machine Learning is necessary for dealing with this problem.
Olivier Leo, Co-Chair of the global agricultural monitoring program (GEOGLAM) presented the main objectives of the program and Ukraine's participation in the development of this program. He also noticed the significant experience of successful cooperation between European research institutions and Ukrainian experts from SRI NASU-SSAU (in particular with the group of prof. Nataliia Kussul)
The Institute has considerable achievements in the development of geospatial analysis methods, Machine Learning and Big data processing domains. The results of the SRI NASU-SSAU are internationally recognized and validated for other regions all over the world (developed methods are proved to be the best within JECAM (Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring) project).
As a result of the symposium it was decided to launch a pilot project for satellite agromonitoring of Ukraine within the Sentinel4Agri project «Sentinel-2 for Agriculture» of Horizon-2020 program participated by Space Research Institute (supervisor - prof. Nataliia Kussul). It was decided to continue applied scientific researches of Ukrainian institutes within the framework of Copernicus, which would contribute to "the vertical integration of satellite agromonitoring at all levels - from the farm to the government agencies engaged in control functions".
