News

Find here the latest STARS news.

08.16.2017 Smallholders in Mali adjust their crop management decisions thanks to satellite monitoring Farmers and scientists in Mali are learning first-hand how satellite technology can be used to interpret crop performance and alter decision-making on-farm. read more ...
07.18.2017 Applications for agriculture ICT Update agricultural magazine number 85 is on applications for agriculture. read more ...
02.27.2017 Data Driven Farming Price How can data help Nepali smallholder farmers produce higher yields? That is what the organisers of a data-driven farming competition are hoping to find out. read more ...
12.08.2016 Designing novel classification approaches for mapping smallholder farms Reliable crop maps are crucial for informed decision making and to support sustainable farming in smallholder agriculture. Two MSc students are trying to find smart solutions to produce better crop maps. read more ...
11.30.2016 Farewell to Sentinel 2B Just weeks before Sentinel-2B is packed up and sent to French Guiana for its launch next March, media representatives and specialists got one last look at the second satellite for Europe’s Copernicus programme. read more ...
11.28.2016 The STARS Landscaping Study: identifying real and viable opportunities for agricultural development Find out what the main questions were that were used to guide the analysis of opportunities for new remote-sensing technologies. read more ...
11.14.2016 Landscaping Study One of the main components of the STARS project is the Landscaping Study. The report of this study is available now! read more ...
10.04.2016 Drones for Agriculture available in Swahili The issue of the magazine ICT Update n. 82 on “Drones for Agriculture” has now been translated into Swahili and is available for download. read more ...
08.02.2016 Student's research results on VHR RS in agriculture available through STARS knowledge portal Three Wageningen University students did research on the application of very high resolution remotesensing in smallholder agriculture. A summary of their work is now available through the STARS Knowledge Portal. read more ...
07.06.2016 Earth Observation from Space: the Optical View Discover how optical Earth observation data is gathered and used in this free online course from the European Space Agency (ESA). read more ...
06.30.2016 Fully automated system extracts information on smallholder farms from raw satellite data From data to information: an automated smallholder agriculture-specific satellite image processing workflow has been established. read more ...
06.15.2016 A lot of interest for Drones for Agriculture The issue of the magazine ICT Update n. 82 on “Drones for Agriculture” has raised a lot of interest. The first run of 5000 copies (English and French) is exhausted and a second run is now being printed. read more ...
06.02.2016 Crowdsourcing experiment to enrich STARS field data collection After the successful first crowdsourcing mapping party last year, a second mapping party was held on 20th April 2016 at the University of Twente/Faculty of ITC, Netherlands. read more ...
06.02.2016 Field data collection training in Uganda Field measurements on crop condition are an important source of information for food security monitoring. AgriSense-STARS organized a training on field data collection in Masaka, Uganda, building off alread existing capacity. read more ...
06.01.2016 CIP UAV workshop The International Potato Center (CIP) organizes the second UAV Community of Practice Workshop in Nairobi, June 6-7, 2016. read more ...
05.31.2016 Early warning crop monitor Africa Early warning crop monitor: crop conditions at a glance for food security in Africa. read more ...
05.29.2016 Feasibility of large-scale surface water use for irrigation in Bangladesh Just how feasible is large-scale surface water use for irrigation in Bangladesh’s southern delta region ? read more ...
05.24.2016 African mosaic Remarkable news from ESA: a cloud-free satellite image mosaic of the entire African continent using images from one single satellite and captured within a time frame of only 5 months. read more ...
05.12.2016 Drones for agriculture The ICT Update agricultural magazine has recently published a special issue with fourteen articles on the use of drones or UAVs in agriculture. read more ...
05.02.2016 MSc research results now available Earlier we published the theses of two MSc students who conducted research in the STARS domain. Now we have added the work of two others! read more ...
03.03.2016 Developing a Comprehensive System for Food Security Monitoring in Tanzania – Stakeholder Workshop Tools based on remote sensing, smartphone and internet technology that produce near real-time information designed to feed directly into a monthly National Food Security Bulletin. For what reason? Food security. A variety of stakeholders showed interest during a workshop organized in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania recently. read more ...
03.02.2016 Food security situation, Karamoja, Uganda Catherine Nakalembe, STARS East Africa team member, reports on the current food security situation in Karamoja, Uganda and on how STARS supports the government by providing tools to accurately monitor the situation. read more ...
03.01.2016 Nigeria for CSSL Part of the STARS work portfolio is the development of the Crop Spectrotemporal Signature Library, the CSSL. The purpose of the CSSL is to become a repository of crop-characteristic data, as crops are followed through the growing season. read more ...
02.24.2016 Sentinel-3A, ESA's next step in earth observation program With the launch of Sentinel-3A last week, ESA has taken a next step in monitoring the earth surface. read more ...
02.03.2016 Speed and Altitude: The Secrets Revealed for Very Low Altitude Image Processing This article reports on the experiences of our Bangladesh team with respect to image processing and image quality when flying a UAV at low altitudes. read more ...
02.03.2016 Workshop on Remote Sensing and Mobile Data Collection Tools for National Food Security Reporting in Tanzania Modern remote sensing, smart phone and collaborative online tools make it possible to produce timely and reliable information on crop growth. Published in monthly bulletins, this is an effective way to inform decision makers, enabling them to act accordingly. As was experienced in a workshop recently. read more ...
02.01.2016 GEOGLAM Crop Monitor technical video Watch this video which takes you through the technique behind the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor. This tool has been customized in the STARS project for use in East Africa. read more ...
02.01.2016 MSc theses in STARS Knowledge Portal It is with great pleasure that we can share with you the results of MSc research in the STARS domain. read more ...
01.28.2016 UAVs set to give global farming a makeover is the title of an article in The Guardian, describing various applications of UAVs in smallholder economies. read more ...
01.27.2016 Gates on development cooperation funding by the Dutch government In an interview with the Volkskrant, Gates commented on the development cooperation funding by the Netherlands, callling it important to maintain current budgets for development cooperation. read more ...
01.25.2016 Why the Future Is Bright for the World’s Poorest Farmers Technology is transforming farming even in the world's poorest countries. Bill Gates shares how the future of agriculture will shape up. read more ...
01.13.2016 ESA's FLEX mision ESA’s Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) mission, to be launched in 2022, will map vegetation fluorescence to quantify photosynthetic activity. This activity is an indicator for the actual productivity of vegetation which can be used to support agricultural management. read more ...
01.12.2016 Report on GFIA Africa edition The GFIA Africa Edition 2015 was held in Durban, Republic of South Africa, 1-2 December 2015. STARS team member Tukur Abdulazeez presented the STARS West African use case. He reports on this event. read more ...
12.03.2015 STARS at GEO event STARS was featured during two side events of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Twelfth Plenary and Ministerial Summit, convened in Mexico City November 9-13th, and received much positive interest and attention from a wide international community. read more ...
12.01.2015 CIP has joined STARS It is with great pleasure that we can announce that the team of the International Potato Center (CIP), led by Roberto Quiroz has joined the STARS family. read more ...
11.23.2015 STARS in French, Hausa and Swahili To better serve our target audience in STARS geographies, we have developed French, Hausa and Swahili versions of the factsheet and the website. read more ...
11.02.2015 STARS technical workshop in Dakar, Senegal Recently all STARS field teams together with the University of Twente convened in Dakar, Senegal for a Technical Workshop. The scope of the meeting was to discuss the technical and scientific part of the project. read more ...
11.02.2015 STARS showcase in the Asian Conference on Remote Sensing 2015 The 36th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing (ACRS 2015) was recently held in Manila, Phillipines. With STARS attending en presenting. read more ...
10.07.2015 STARS report showing evidence of food security issue in Karamoja Uganda The AgriSense STARS team recently prepared a report with overwhelming evidence on the cricital food security situation in Karamoja, Uganda. An immediate decision was made by the Minister of Finance to send relief food to Karamoja. read more ...
10.05.2015 Image co-registration at very high spatial resolutions To follow crop development over time means we need to follow pixels over time. To that end, pixels must align perfectly, and this is hard to achieve. STARS is currently working on co-registration of Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite images in farming areas. read more ...
10.02.2015 Area Frame Design and Field Campaign in Kilosa District One of STARS’s outcomes, The Global Agricultural Monitoring System (GLAM-East Africa) proved to be a reliable tool for determining crop and vegetation health in Kilosa District, Tanzania, when the results were tested against field data. read more ...
10.02.2015 Planet Labs donates imagery Planet Labs announced that $60 million worth of its satellite imagery would be made openly available and accessible to the global community. read more ...
09.30.2015 Widespread crop failure in Karamoja, Uganda Developing methods to monitor crop conditions for early warning becomes more critical now that crops failed for the second year in a row in Karamoja, Uganda. read more ...
09.17.2015 High level stakeholder meeting in Uganda On September 3, 2015, the AgriSense-STARS team, together with partners, hosted a high level stakeholder meeting in Kampala, Uganda. read more ...
08.18.2015 Eagle knocks UAV out of sky Operating an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is sometimes challenging. Especially when such a challenge comes unexpected...... read more ...
08.04.2015 Planet Labs To Acquire RapidEye Planet Labs announced a definite agreement to acquire BlackBridge's geospatial business. read more ...
07.13.2015 Sentinel-2 delivers first image The recently launched Sentinel-2 satellite has delivered its first image. The combination of frequent revisiting, the high spatial resolution and the wide swath are leveraging new opportunities and applications in earth monitoring, such as STARS objective in studying small farming systems. read more ...
07.10.2015 STARS project General Meeting From 24-26 June 2015, ITC hosted the STARS General Meeting. Experts from all five project partners (CSIRO, ICRISAT, UMD, CIMMYT and ITC), four external advisors, and officers of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, gathered in Enschede. read more ...
05.19.2015 AgriSense-Africa STARS Tracks Impact of Late Rains on Crops in Central and Northern Tanzania One of the new tools developed by the University of Maryland (UMD)-lead AgriSense-Africa STARS project is the GLAM-East Africa system, which provides satellite remote sensing observations from the MODIS sensor for tracking and monitoring crop conditions. read more ...
05.12.2015 First STARS Mapping Party at ITC On the 1st of May 2015, the STARS project team organized at ITC in Enschede a “Mapping party,” in which volunteers helped to digitize and classify remote sensing images. read more ...
05.07.2015 Pre-season training on coordinated field and UAV campaigns organized in Bamako, Mali From April 20-30, the ISABELA team, STARS operations lead in West Africa organized a training workshop at the ICRISAT-Bamako campus to train Mali and Nigeria team members on coordinated field and UAV measurement campaigns and data processing. read more ...
04.23.2015 Springtime in the Netherlands Take a beautiful flight with a UAV over the colorful flower fields near the Keukenhof Gardens in The Netherlands. read more ...
04.07.2015 Mobile Data Collection Facilitating Agricultural Monitoring for Food Security in Tanzania The University of Maryland (UMD) and Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) are building agriculture-monitoring capacity in Tanzania through electronic field data collection and delivery as part of the STARS AgriSense-Africa project. During a workshop for this pilot project held 19th March 2015 at the SUA campus in Morogoro, the GeoODK Android Application was introduced. read more ...
03.04.2015 UAVs used for first time in Bangladesh For the first time in the country, agriculturalists have started using UAVs to monitor farmlands in the southern districts of Barisal and Patuakhali. read more ...
03.02.2015 New STARS website It is with great pleasure that we present to you our new STARS website. In a nutshell: new looks, new content and it is running on desktop, tablet and smartphone! read more ...

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