Using aerial photography for vineyard identification

The European Commission's Institute for Space Applications, part of the Joint Research Centre, has published an invitation to tender for the completion of a series of evaluation studies within the context of the MARS project (Monitoring Agriculture with Remote Sensing). The M...

The European Commission's Institute for Space Applications, part of the Joint Research Centre, has published an invitation to tender for the completion of a series of evaluation studies within the context of the MARS project (Monitoring Agriculture with Remote Sensing).

The MARS project provides the Directorate-General for Agriculture (DG VI) with technical support for effectively setting up the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy. It has a bearing upon the complete range of agricultural products for which aid is allocated on a geographical basis, and for which remote sensing, in the broad sense of the term (spatial or airborne), and geographical information systems (GIS) constitute key instruments of management and surveillance.

In particular, a reform is currently under negotiation in relation to the vineyard register, suggesting the possibility of establishing a "simplified register", or "vineyard GIS", which would consist, inter alia, of aerial photographs, and thus constituting a point of reference and surveillance for vineyards under culture.

This invitation to tender aims at providing the Commission with key elements of information regarding the choice of technical facilities for aerial recording and exploitation, and their practical consequences (operating costs, reliability and accuracy of the information).

The evaluation studies to be carried out in this respect will cover one or more of the following areas:

- Scale, emulsion and date of aerial recording;
- Digital photography;
- Photo-interpretation;
- Structure detection or another expert system;
- Mapping scale and incidence of generalizations/simplifications, etc.
Requests for tender documents should be addressed to:

European Commission
Joint Research Centre
Mr. Paul Vossen
Mars/Agricultural Information Systems project
Institute for Space Applications
Building TP 440
I-21020 Ispra (VA)
Tel. [phone]; Fax [phone]

Completed tenders are to be sent to the same address. All correspondence should clearly state "Invitation to tender for the identification of vineyards using aerial photography".

Further information is available on the World Wide Web at:

http://aisws6.jrc.it:2001