Conference Agenda

Reliable statistics are foundational for evidence-based policy and for tracking progress toward national and global agri-food systems. Agricultural statistics inform decisions on productivity, resilience, and sustainability. But conventional sources, such as farm surveys, censuses, and administrative records are costly, infrequent, and uneven in coverage, creating gaps in timeliness, spatial detail, and comparability. These gaps are especially acute for emerging priorities such as land-use change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture and land use, and the intensity and risks associated with fertilizer and pesticide applications. Earth observations (EO) provide consistent, frequent, and scalable measures to help close these gaps. Optical and radar satellites reveal crop types, phenology, management intensity, and land conversion, and ancillary datasets support inference on emissions drivers and environmental risks. Integrating EO with in situ monitoring and standardized methodologies enables more consistent, granular, and timely indicators that support agri-food systems, climate and biodiversity commitments, and SDG reporting. Major scope of the workshop is to help participants operate EO for official-quality statistics. We will feature 5 to 7 invited talks on the topics above and facilitate brainstorming to develop concrete proposals on: (1) EO requirements for agri-food statistics; (2) harmonized definitions for agri-food system statistics across land cover/use categories; (3) QA/QC and intercomparison of remote-sensing data products; and (4) data infrastructure for delivering remote-sensing products.

This workshop will delve into current needs and opportunities for integrating forest biomass information from forest inventories, national statistics and Earth Observation to strengthen the monitoring and reporting of forest biomass for environmental assessments and climate action. We will begin by reviewing the latest recommendations on using EO-based biomass products within MRV processes and international frameworks, as well as briefly touch upon ESA’s Biomass mission advances. Building upon recent discussions led by the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI), we will discuss three different pathways leading towards the integration of these datasets, namely (1) key considerations informing the design of new ground-based campaigns to ensure both compatibility with and added value from EO datasets; (2) lessons learned from experiences combining and harmonizing different existing in-situ data (e.g., National Forest Inventories, among others) for their integration with EO datasets; and (3) assessment of inferential strategies for the integration of EO-based biomass datasets with in-situ data to enhance the precision of biomass estimates at different geographical scales. These pathways aim to support a broad range of end users in biomass estimation for forest monitoring and management purposes. The workshop will open with short presentations highlighting success stories and state-of-the-art examples on these themes, followed by a short round of questions. Afterwards, three parallel round-table discussion groups, focusing respectively on the three pathways for conceiving the integration of in-situ data, EO-based biomass datasets and national statistics. The session will conclude with summary presentations from the three discussion groups, followed by closing remarks and next steps. We aim to map existing efforts, key considerations, best practices and research needs under these themes, bridging efforts in tropical and temperate regions, and ultimately summarizing these findings in a perspective paper or policy brief. The policy brief or perspective paper will summarize the efforts, considerations, and best practices for integrating ground-based and EO data for forest-related biomass estimation, with examples ranging from tropical to temperate (European) forests. This an outcome envisioned from both this workshop and the insights from the upcoming GFOI R&D Exchange on Biomass Estimation.