ESA WorldCereal
Creators: name: WorldCereal Consortium
Publisher: name: GEO Knowledge Hub
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries

description: WorldCereal is a research project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and aims to build an open and user-friendly processing system allowing anyone to generate custom cropland and crop type maps based on free and open Earth Observation data.
The WorldCereal project is being executed by an international consortium, led by VITO Remote Sensing, in two distinctive phases.
WorldCereal Phase I (June 2020 – June 2023)
The first phase of this project aimed to support the agricultural community by providing a system that demonstrates the feasibility of a seasonal global crop monitoring system at field level.
The major outcome of this phase has been the "WorldCereal suite of global products for the year 2021". This is a collection of 10 m resolution, global maps, including a temporary crops extent map, as well as season-specific maps on active cropland, crop type (corn, winter cereals and spring cereals, with cereals defined as a combination of wheat, barley and rye) and active irrigation.
Other important achievements which have contributed to these products, include:

Global crop calendars for maize and wheat: To produce season-specific crop type products, the definition of seasonality needs to be clear in all parts of the globe. We developed gridded global crop calendars at 0.5◦ resolution for maize and wheat, leveraging the main existing global crop calendar products (GEOGLAM Crop Monitor, USDA-FAS, FAO and JRC's ASAP).
WorldCereal Agro-Ecological Zones: To tackle the complexity of producing global, yet season-specific crop type products, the world has been divided into "agro-ecological zones", driven mainly by differences in local agricultural seasons of maize and wheat.
Global, harmonized in-situ reference data on land cover, crop types and irrigation: To train robust crop classification models, you ideally need global representative, multi-year reference data. The WorldCereal project collected, curated and harmonized datasets from various sources and made them available to the user community.
WorldCereal processing system v1: The first version of the WorldCereal processing module has been deployed both on CreoDIAS and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The source code of this implementation is available as an open-source GitHub repository.
WorldCereal Phase II (December 2023 - December 2026)
Building upon the accomplishments of WorldCereal Phase I, the team is now largely focusing on increasing the adoption of the WorldCereal system by an ever-growing user community. 
Specifically, we are pursuing the following objectives:

Converting the WorldCereal prototype system into a full-fledged cloud-based processing system, easily accessible to anyone.
Making the classification system more generic and customizable, allowing it to be used for any local/regional crop (type) mapping activity, i.e. not being restricted to cereals.
Demonstrating the accuracy and use of the WorldCereal classification products in the context of global to regional monitoring of food security, by running regional use cases in collaboration with potential end users of the system.
Expanding and training the agricultural monitoring community in the use of the WorldCereal system
Using the updated WorldCereal system to produce a new and expanded set of season-specific global crop type products