Sino-Japanese collaborations benefit China's crop monitoring system

摘要

Remotely sensed data has played an important role in agricultural monitoring across space and time. This paper reviews ten years of collaboration studies in agricultural remote sensing between IARRP and JIRCAS. This successful collaboration has made great contributions to the development of China Agricultural Remote Sensing Monitoring System (CHARMS) with the support of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture. The monitoring system has been in operation and running since 2002. To date, CHARMS has been applied for mapping of crop planting areas, monitoring of crop growth, estimation of crop yields, monitoring of natural disasters, supporting of precision and facility agriculture. However, the CHARMS system is still confronted with great challenges. Advancing algorithms of agronomic parameters and soil quality for satellite data are favored in future research, especially to improve the performance of remote sensing monitoring in the fragmented landscapes. In addition, the thematic series of products in terms of land cover, crop allocation, crop growth and production are required to be addressed in association with other data sources at multiple spatial scales.