Earth Observation for agricultural drought monitoring in the Pannonian Basin (southeastern Europe): current state and future directions

Abstract

The Pannonian Basin in southeastern Europe is heavily used for rain-fed agriculture. The region experienced several droughts in the last years, causing major yield losses. Ongoing climate change, characterised by increasing temperatures and potential evapotranspiration, and by changes in precipitation distribution will likely increase the frequency and intensity of drought episodes in the future. Hence, ongoing monitoring of droughts and estimation of their impact on agriculture is necessary to adapt agricultural practices to changing weather and climate extremes. Several regional initiatives, projects and online tools have been established to facilitate drought monitoring and management in the Pannonian Basin. However, reliable systems to forecast potential drought impacts on plant productivity and agricultural yields at monthly to seasonal scales are only in their infancy, as plant response to climatic extremes is still poorly understood. With the increasing availability of high-resolution and long-term Earth Observation (EO) data and recent progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence, further improvements in drought monitoring and impact prediction capacities are expected. Here we review the current state of drought monitoring in the Pannonian Basin, identify EO-based variables to potentially improve regional drought impact monitoring and outline future perspectives for seasonal forecasts of drought impacts on agriculture.

Drying conditions in Switzerland – indication from a 35-year Landsat time-series analysis of vegetation water content estimates to support SDGs

“…With its long history and continuous observations, remote sensing technologies revolutionized the field of drought monitoring over different spatial and temporal scale (West, Quinn, & Horswell, 2019). EO have improved knowledge of drought monitoring and the ability to assess drought condition and evolution providing near-real time information (Crocetti et al, 2020). This study demonstrates that NDWI could be valuable as additional indicator for drought monitoring at different spatial and temporal scale.…”

“…Among other it can affect land productivity and land cover change and in turn can therefore influence land degradation, food security, well-being, water availability and quality, and inequalities (Cowie et al, 2018;Cherlet et al, 2018;Gregory Giuliani et al, 2020). Drought monitoring refers to the continuous collection and analysis of drought indicators based firstly on in situ measurements of environmental variables (Crocetti et al, 2020). With its long history and continuous observations, remote sensing technologies revolutionized the field of drought monitoring over different spatial and temporal scale (West, Quinn, & Horswell, 2019).…”

Impact of temperature and water availability on microwave-derived gross primary production

“…Different studies have employed VOD for deriving various plant properties or vegetation characteristics that can be related to the plant's water content, including biomass estimation (Liu et al, 2015;Brandt et al, 2018;Rodríguez-Fernández et al, 2018;Chaparro et al, 2019;Fan et al, 2019;Frappart et al, 2020;Wigneron et al, 2020;Li et al, 2021), crop yield (Chaparro et al, 2018), tree mortality (Rao et al, 2019;Sapes et al, 2019), analysis of burned area (Forkel et al, 2019), ecosystem-scale isohydricity (Konings and Gentine, 2017), plant water uptake during dry downs (Feldman et al, 2018) and plant water storage (Tian et al, 2018). VOD, or microwave satellite observations in general, is also analyzed for its potential in detecting the impact of drought (Song et al, 2019;Crocetti et al, 2020). Despite the sensitivity of VOD to vegetation water content, the relationship between VOD and gross primary production (GPP) has not yet been analyzed with regard to how the relationship responds to varying conditions of dryness or wetness.…”

Seasonal ecosystem vulnerability to climatic anomalies in the Mediterranean

“…The Mediterranean Basin is characterised by large spatial variability because of its complex topography (Lionello et al, 2006). The relatively coarse resolution of the ESA CCI soil moisture data set is currently limiting the representation of this high spatial complexity (Crocetti et al, 2020). Many land cover classes express similar patterns over the course of the year according to our results.…”