Recent Advances in Agrometeorological Analysis Techniques for Crop Monitoring in Support of Food Security Early Warning

About this Research Topic

Background

This Research Topic is part of the Recent Advances in Agrometeorological Analysis Techniques for Crop Monitoring in Support of Food Security Early Warning series: Recent Advances in Agrometeorological Analysis Techniques for Crop Monitoring in Support of Food Security Early Warning, Volume II

Rain-fed agriculture is an important factor for food security, accounting for over 80 percent of crop land globally. Irrigation systems are also critically important, given the comparatively high yields and lowered risk under irrigation. With approximately 2 billion people around the world experiencing varying degrees of food insecurity, frequent monitoring of crop conditions for assessment and projection of end-of-season harvest is a key contributor to the provision of early warning of food insecurity. Resource constraints however limit the high-frequency application of field-based observational techniques for such assessments. In the last decade, severe drought shocks left tens of millions of people food insecure in several African countries, highlighting the importance of timely food security early warning for informing emergency response.

Over the last few years, several factors have been converging to promote and facilitate the use of alternative crop monitoring and early warning methodologies that hinge on agrometeorological techniques. These factors include the monotonic increase and commonization of computational power and storage, ever-growing earth observation data archives, new satellite sensors, greater cloud-based data access, and improved meteorological and agrometeorological modelling techniques.

For this Research Topic, we invite authors to submit papers that detail recent advances in agrometeorological monitoring techniques, particularly those methods that have current or potential future usage in food security early warning systems. We welcome contributions that address the following topics:

• Use of in-situ, satellite and modelled data in agrometeorological modelling and early warning
• Crop yield and production estimation and forecasting
• Tailoring of meteorology and climate forecasts for agrometeorology applications
• Development, improvement, validation and comparison of agrometeorology datasets
• Methodologies for agrometeorological field data collection and analysis
• Offline and web-based agrometeorology software applications
• Cloud-computing for agrometeorology applications
• Usage of agrometeorological early warning information by end-users

This Research Topic is open for the following article types: Original Research, Mini Review, Opinion, Review, Brief Research Report, Conceptual Analysis, Perspective, Technology and Code, Case Studies, and Methods.

Keywords: food security, early warning, satellite, modelling, in-situ, crop yield estimation, field data analysis, cloud computing, software applications

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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