Exploration of Radar Imageries for Food Security Intelligence

Abstract

Three food commodities were prioritized by the Government of Indonesia to be monitored, namely : paddy, palm oil and sugarcane. The existing established list based monitoring system of Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) for national paddy production estimation need to be improved by applying the area based approach. As a consequences, an exercise to develop the capacity of area based approach by applying Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) imageries was implemented. Due to the availability limitation of the appropriate SAR imageries, the study was first concentrated on the crop identification and location. Its was started first with palm-oil (Envisat/ASAR, EIRBEX 2002-2004) in Riau, followed by ‘paddy’ (AirSAR, PacRIM 2000) in East Borneo. The capacities developed in these two campaigns are then consolidated for paddy application scheduled to be implemented under ALOS/PALSAR, AIPEX 2007-2009, as presented in this paper.