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),