Integrated provincial crop monitoring system using remote sensing

Based on “CropWatch-China”, an integrated provincial crop monitoring system with remote sensing (CropWatch- Province) was developed. Taking remote sensing data as the major data source, the system can implement crop condition monitoring, crop yield prediction, crop acreage estimation, cropping index monitoring, agro-meteorological analysis and crop production prediction at the scale of county, main producing region and province. The methods, structure, function and major characteristics of the system were described in detail in the paper. The system passed the test of “Conformance Test Center for Information Technology Standards” in 2010. Three major characteristics were concluded from the system, which are high integration, flexible customization and the application of new satellite data. For flexible customization, the functions and the monitoring areas of the system can easily be customized according to users’ requirement; For high integration, the total missions of data pre-processing, scientific computation, information extraction and result output can be implemented with the system; For application of new satellite data, new data like HJ-1 can be processed and used for crop monitoring in the system.