Completion of the Agricultural Monitoring and Yield Estimation of the Summer Season in Eastern and Middle of SUDAN 2011-2012:

Mierag Space Technology Co. SUDAN with its technical partners, Excel Geomatics (India) and Rapid-Eye Germany (as satellite Images Provider), has announced successful finalizing and presenting of the final report concerning its activities in Mapping of Summer Crops of Eastern and Middle part of Sudan for year 2011-2012. Remote Sensing, GIS and field work were the main technologies used in project. The project objectives were targeting:
- Crops Acreage in both rain-fed areas and Irrigated Systems.
- Monitoring of crops health and performance based on analysis of the satellite images and coupling with validation field visits and correlate the result to rainfall rate data.
- The Yield estimation and overall Production of the cash crops.
- Mapping of Crops Distribution and building Geo-database.
An area of more than 210,000 SKM has been covered twice during the season which covers almost six of the main agriculturally potential states in Sudan.

Study area

Rapid-Eye satellites Imageries have proven to be of great helpful capabilities, making use of its highly frequent re-visit capability, for covering the large target areas, cloud free, within a short time span.
- Two field visits by agriculture experts and remote sensing teams have been took place. One visit after the analysis of the first set of the Rapid-Eye images. The purpose of this visit was, to understand the crops distributions, crop pattern and crop characteristics within the study area besides, collecting the spectral signature of the different crops to assist in crop discriminations on the images.

First and second Complete Rapid-Eye Capturing of the study area

- The purpose of the second visit was to validate the crop classification and discrimination between different crops beside, collecting information about the crop health, crop performance, and sample of productivities.

Crop Discrimination Criteria:
Several Criteria were used in discrimination between the different crops.
- Signature Based Classification.
- Time Series based classification.
- Crop Pattern.
- Crop Characteristic.
Again the high advantages of Rapid-Eye multi-spectral imageries in term of temporal and Spectral discrimination capabilities were of great helpful in optimizing the classification and accordingly enhancing of the final result.

Sample of Spectral Capabilities of Rapid-Eye Images in discriminating different crops.

Sample of Crop Pattern Classification of the Groundnut crop

Sample of Crop Characteristic Classification

Sample of Crop Characteristic Classification

Different Crop classification in Irrigated System Sector

Sample of the Crop Performance Result in Rain-fed Area

Sample of the Crop Classification Result in Rain-fed Area

The final report was able to tell and describe in detail the Acreage of each crop up to the level of the small owner farm, the productivity of each crop within different Schemes and different region of the study area, the crop performance and stressed areas, the total Production of the study area by state level or irrigated sector levels. Finally, Mierag Co. is appreciating the effort of its partners which is led to the success of such kind of the first application in SUDAN.

Participation in the International Exhibition of Services and Banking Technology:

The Company participates in the International Exhibition of Services and Banking Technology at the Fairgrounds in borri. The company's participation in the exhibition came as a contractor with the Agricultural Bank of Sudan to implement the space survey project to monitoring agricultural activities.