The international workshop “Agriculture and Earth Observation” will be held on July 4-5, 2017 in The Hague and is organized by the Netherlands Space Office (NSO) in cooperation with ESA and AeroVision BV.

Modern agriculture relies ever more on the availability of accurate, diverse and continuous information from a variety of data and services. Earth Observation has a clear potential to help address these agricultural needs.

Goal of the workshop

This workshop intends to explore the variety of data sources available and provide a common forum for institutional, scientific and commercial users. It will bring together satellite data and service providers, value adding companies and commercial, public and scientific users, thus closing the loop between user information needs and the evolution of applications based on current space borne data sets and future observation requirements. Furthermore this workshop will showcase the large potential of synergistically using satellite observations for agricultural applications and their benefit for society. The workshop will provide a discussion forum to share knowledge about the evolution of user needs and future data systems currently being elaborated. Finally, the workshop will provide an opportunity to build capacity in the agricultural user community.

Programme

The 2-day workshop will be organised in three main sessions, addressing

• What is needed, with presentations from commercial, public and scientific users
• What is there, providing an overview of the variety of satellite and in-situ data sources available and information services and applications being built upon them
• Future opportunities, summarizing current and future evolutions in satellite and in-situ data provision versus user needs

These sessions will be followed by discussion fora  to gather feedback on the proposed themes from the workshop attendees, being summarised in a position paper to be released after the workshop.

Please visit the workshop website for information on the workshop’s objectives and (preliminary) programme.

Participants

The workshop is open to:

• Current and potential future operational users of Earth Observation data and information services,  including commercial users, value adding industry, meteorological and hydrological forecasting services, regional authorities for agricultural management, Copernicus Services etc.
• Scientific and institutional users
• Decision makers and funding agencies

In view of the available venue capacity registration is mandatory. There is, however, no registration fee. Please take the registration deadline of June 15, 2017 into account.

Please note that in case registration numbers exceed room capacity, the organizers reserve the right to select participants e.g. on the basis of a maximum number per organization.