REGIONAL CROP MONITORING IN THE HAJDU—BIHAR COUNTY
This part of the paper originally compiled for the FIG Helsinki
conference describes the pilot project "Hajdu-Bihar", currently
being carried out in Hungary related to the application of
satellite remote sensing and GIS in order to support the planned
Crop Information System.
1. INTRODUCTION
" r he agricultural production is very important component in the
Hungarian economy. The major environmental factors as soils,
climate and terrain are feasible for intensive agriculture. Up to
now almost thirty percent of the country has been used for crop
production with high yield. Therefore an efficient National Crop
Information System (NCIS) is indispensable. The one that has been
operational for some three decades now, is based on the reports
of farms. As definite need for a more efficient NCIS arose some
years ago and the fact that farmers, cooperatives tend to be more
and more independent from the government and therefor free from
data reporting obligation, urged to establish a remotely sensed
data based NCIS (Szentesi, 1984).
The average 60-80 hectare fields on the major crop growing
regions provided good opportunity to use high spectra1/spatia1
resolution satellite — even Landsat MSS — data in monitoring
(Remetey,1982). Though these basic figures will very likely
change in the next ten years, the methods that have been
developed to date can easily be adapted to the new environment.
2. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ON APPLICATION OF REMOTE SENSING TO
AGRICULTURAL CROP MONITORING IN HUNGARY
Since 1981 efforts have been made to develop the basic segments
of a remotely sensed data based crop monitoring system (CMS).
Different complementary problems have been addressed as: crop
mapping, inventory (monitoring the changes in area of significant
crops), assessment of crop growth and yield forecast. The
inventory segment of our satellite based CMS is closest to semi-
operational, though there are still a wide range of problems to
be solved e.g:
— adequate hardware/software infrastructure,
— multiplatform data sources avai1abi1ity(Tab1e 1) and data
integ— ration (e.g. environmental satellite and all-weather
airborne data collection CZs^mboki,1988] will be operational in
1991),
— feasibility and comparative studies on thematic land applica
bility of present (for SPOT vs.Landsat: Buttner et al,1987) and
follow—on Earth observation satellites (e.g. the ERS-1 data
utili- zation will be a new challenge for the agricultural
application programmes),