Space-Derived Phenology, Retrieval and Use for Drought and Food Security Monitoring

Monitoring vegetation conditions is a critical activity for assessing food security in Africa. Rural populations relying on rain-fed agriculture and livestock grazing are highly exposed to large seasonal and inter-annual fluctuations in water availability. Monitoring the state, evolution, and productivity of vegetation, crops and pastures in particular, is important to conduct food emergency responses and plan for a long-term, resilient, development strategy in this area.

The timing of onset, the duration, and the intensity of vegetation growth can be retrieved from space observations and used for food security monitoring to assess seasonal vegetation development and forecast the likely seasonal outcome when the season is ongoing.

In this contribution we present a set of phenology-based remote sensing studies in support to food security analysis. Key phenological indicators are retrieved using a model-fit approach applied to SOPT-VEGETATION FAPAR time series. Remote-sensing phenology is first used to estimate i) the impact of the drought in the Horn of Africa, ii) crop yield in Tunisia and, iii) rangeland biomass production in Niger. Then the impact of the start and length of vegetation growing period on the total biomass production is assessed over the Sahel. Finally, a probabilistic approach using phenological information to forecast the occurrence of an end-of-season biomass production deficit is applied over the Sahel to map hot-spots of drought-related risk.