ABSTRACT
Much of other work in Europe is directed from the Joint Research Centre of the EEC at Ispra, Italy. The JRC Pilot Project for remote sensing applied to agricultural statistics is engaged in a la-year programme directed towards regional inventories, monitoring of vegetation and production indices, yield forecast models, rapid estimates of areas and potential yields, at a European scale. In the case of regional inventories, test sites totalling some 20 000 km2 have been set up in Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Spain. The availability of SPOT and TM data was not a limiting factor for these chosen sites, although one would expect severe difficulties in cloudier territories in Europe, such as the UK. The methodology for integration of ground and satellite data is complex and JRC has developed special software programmes to ensure that results can be obtained in a timely manner.
