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We present the development of a thermal IR camera for a nanosat In Orbit Demonstration (IOD) mission. The primary objective of the TIR remote sensing mission is Land Surface Temperature (LST) and derived evapotranspiration (ET). On the longer term we aim at building up a constellation of satellites allowing a fast revisit time in the order of one to a couple of days.

The integration of crop growth models with remote sensing has presented great potential in (regional) crop yield forecasting; although so far few field-level applications exist. Based on crowd/farm-sourced observations (phenological stages and yield measurements) and a basic assimilation procedure using satellite (DMC) and digital hemispherical pictures (DHP) derived green fractional cover data (fCover), the AquaCrop plug-in model was assessed for winter wheat fields in Belgium. A semi-automated R-environment was developed to simultaneously run, assess and evaluate the ensemble of field-level simulations. The root mean square error (RMSE) was 0.8 ton/ha. It was concluded that the presented approach might be promising for large scale field-level yield forecasting.

WatchITGrow is a web-based application developed for potato monitoring in Belgium. The different components encompass a back-end with biophysical parameters derived from high resolution satellite imagery, agrometeorological algorithms, phenological development and crop models; and a front-end with dashboards to visualize spatio-temporal information and insert potato field information.