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DROMAS to help Czech farmers

DROMAS project is based on an innovative approach for monitoring and assessment of the risk and prevention of damage caused by agricultural drought.

The economic damage caused by drought in Czech agriculture is huge and still growing. These damages can be quantified both in agricultural sector (losses in agricultural production) as well as in the case of state administration (compensation paid to farmers). Still there is not paid sufficient attention to this issue and effective tools for monitoring drought, for an objective quantification of damages or for the design and implementation of preventive measures are missing. Information on the development and the possible drought threat is based solely on meteorological data, while the real agriculture conditions of vegetation and soil moisture are not yet monitored at all.

The objective of the DROMAS (Agricultural DROught Monitoring and Assessment driven by Satellites) project is to assess the technical feasibility and the commercial viability of the proposed agricultural drought monitoring service. Integration of meteorological data, vegetation canopy indicators based on satellite imagery and targeted collection of ground truth soil moisture data will allow operational monitoring focused on identification and development of agricultural drought throughout the growing season. At the same time it will be possible to elaborate the risk analysis of drought threats in different regions of the Czech Republic as well as analysis and design of specific adaptation measures for the prevention of damage in the future.

DROMAS project is supported by the ESA ARTES Integrated Applications Programme (IAPARTES element 20). The project team is coordinated by Gisat and includes two additional partners – Czech University of Life Sciences and EKOTOXA.

Gisat provides wide range of geoinformation services based on Earth Observation technology. It focuses on operational application of satellite mapping to monitor various aspects of our environment and development of dedicated web based platforms for geoinformation analysis and assessment Web // E-mail // Tel:+420 271741935 // Fax: +420 271741936