At an executive committee meeting held in June for the Earth Observation Organization (GEO) Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM) program, Prof. WU Bingfang from RADI, together with Bettina Baruth from the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Union, and Prof. Chris Justice from the University of Maryland serve as co-chairs of GEOGLAM Executive Committee.

In addition, several RADI young scientists undertake theme co-chairs, marking further RADI involvement in the program and more responsibilities of RADI’s CropWatch team in boosting global food security.

GEOGLAM as a GEO initiative was initially launched by the Group of Twenty (G20) Agriculture Ministers in June 2011, in Paris. After five years of development, GEOGLAM has become GEO's flagship program, which aims to provide coordinated Earth observations from satellites and integrating them with ground-based and other in-situ measurements, and therefore contribute to generating reliable, accurate, timely and sustained crop monitoring information and yield forecasts.

RADI is one of the founding members of the initiative.

Prof. Wu and his CropWatch group team at RADI have long been engaging in agricultural monitoring by using remote sensing technology. Since 1998, CropWatch has developed into China’s leading crop monitoring system by assessing national and global crop production and related information using remote sensing and ground-based indicators.

The group publishes CropWatch bulletin quarterly in both Chinese and English, presenting latest crop conditions and prospects, and estimate crop yields at regional and global levels.

As a part of GEOGLAM, China’s CropWatch system aims to maintain reliable and accurate information in global crop monitoring for the program, therefore contribute more to global food security.

At the meeting, the new Executive Committee has reorganized, adjusted and enriched the themes of GEOGLAM, resulted in the following seven themes: infrastructure (cloud computing and knowledge management), global monitoring coordination, coordination and R&D of EO data, monitoring system improvement, grassland monitoring, and capacity development.