Since its inception GEOGLAM has made significant progress in support of operational monitoring. To protect and sustain this progress knowledge management is a high priority for the community, consequently GEOGLAM is working with the GEO Secretariat to develop the GEO Knowledge Hub (KH). Once complete the hub will provide a one stop shop for agricultural monitoring “best practices”. The GEOGLAM KH is intended to meet the needs of a wide range of clients. It will include everything from peer reviewed science all the way to operational tools and links to cloud computing environments.

GEOGLAM Knowledge Management is a work in progress in partnership with the GEO Secretariat. We are currently working with GEO to develop the proof of concept for the KH and expectations are that it will be implemented over the course of 2020. So please check back here for progress reports on KH development. In the meantime, this website and the JECAM website can be your gateway to agricultural monitoring knowledge.

Also, one of the GEOGLAM regional initiatives, Agriculture in the Americas has established a "Resource" site which is helping to inform the GEOGLAM efforts. This can be found here.

Developing new or improved monitoring methods requires research and development with a view to practical implementation. In contrast to fundamental or exploratory research GEOGLAM R&D is driven by the practical needs of the targeted operational communities. We call this ‘operational research and development’.

The data, science and technology surrounding agricultural monitoring is constantly evolving. Operational systems are ever improving, new data streams and computing environments come along and our knowledge base grows. Consequently, any operational system must be built upon a solid foundation of R&D. In 2009 the Joint Experiments for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) network was created. JECAM has become one of the primary research focal points of GEOGLAM. The early work that took place over the JECAM sites is now the basis of many of the operational tools the community is using, and this cycle of research to development and operations continues.

This section, while not comprehensive, talks about the status of some of the key contributions to GEOGLAM R&D.

The Research Agenda represents the GEOGLAM communities’ efforts to identify and prioritize a set of topics. It is intended to help guide the GEOGLAM research community and provide direction to research funding agencies on research priorities. The document is available here.

The initial set of topics grouped and listed in the Research Agenda version 1 was discussed at the Annual GEOGLAM Meeting in Sanya, China, August 2018 and subsequently at the JECAM Meeting in Taipei, September 2018. While version 1 is published, it is considered to be a living document because the research priorities change in response to new technology, data and user requirements. For example V1 reflects the preliminary list of Essential Agricultural Variables (EAV’s) for GEOGLAM. A new version of the Agenda will be required once the EAV working group refines this list.

The overarching purpose of JECAM is to compare data and methods for crop area, condition monitoring and yield estimation, with the aim of establishing ‘best practices’ for different agricultural systems. The goal of the JECAM experiments is to facilitate the inter-comparison of monitoring and modelling methods, product accuracy assessments, data fusion, and product integration for agricultural monitoring. These international shared experiments are being undertaken at a series of sites which represent the world’s main cropping systems and agricultural practices. This is an open community activity; all we ask is that participants be ready to share data and science amongst the community. New sites are always welcome, and interested parties can contact JECAM at info@jecam.org.

JECAM develops best practices reference documents for agricultural monitoring research, these can be found here.

Current JECAM projects include the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Inter-comparison Project. The SAR-IC project is developing best practices and operational tools for the application of radar satellite technology to agricultural monitoring. The JECAM website contains project documents, field protocols, newsletters and best practice reference documents here.

Beyond current JECAM projects there a number of past and existing R&D projects that contribute to GEOGLAM outcomes. The following list provides links to some of these initiatives:

• Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) - Agriculture
• NASA Harvest Program
• Sen4Stats
• Sen2Agri
• Stimulating Innovation for Global Monitoring of Agriculture and its Impact on the Environment in support of GEOGLAM (SIGMA)
• GEORICE
• Asia-Rice
• VEGA-GEOGLAM web-based analysis for agriculture monitoring