The 44th edition of the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) was held in Athens from 7 to 12 July 2024. It is the most important international meeting in this area of knowledge, with the participation of more than 2500 experts from 65 countries in the field of geoscience and remote sensing from the scientific-academic environment, business and government agencies.
The IGARSS Scientific Programme aimed to highlight applications related to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, including scientific publications, presentations and papers, discussion forums and posters specialising in remote sensing and geoscience.
We are living in a golden age for Earth observation. Technological and research advances in the field of remote sensing, as well as innovations through artificial intelligence (AI), can be applied to benefit sustainability, climate action, or emergency response.
CEIGRAM researchers with expertise in remote sensing who participated in the event, such as Miguel Quemada, Ernesto Sanz and Íñigo Molina, representing a whole group of researchers working in this field, together with former CEIGRAM members such as José Luis Pancorbo (CNR Italy) and María Dolores Raya (INIA-CSIC), highlighted the importance that CEIGRAM attaches to remote sensing and geoscience.
Of the 412 sessions that took place, Miguel Quemada and José Luis Pancorbo were the organisers and moderators of three sessions focused on the application of remote sensing to agriculture. Specifically on the monitoring of conservation agriculture practices (cover crops, tillage systems) and on improving the use of natural resources. Ernesto Sanz had the opportunity to present two papers, which could have been of interest to the audience and which were very well received. The first research presented was entitled: ‘Land Suitability assessment for barley yield prediction using multicriteria analysis’, a work by Faten Ksantini, Miguel Quemada, Andrés Almeida, Ernesto Sanz and Ana María Tarquis. This presentation focused on the use of machine learning to improve agricultural management. On the other hand, the second paper was entitled ‘Modelling of water cycle at catchment scale aided by geographical information systems’, a work by Ernesto Sanz, Andrés Almeida, Ana M. Tarquis and Sergio Zubelzu. The paper presented the development of geographic information systems tools to facilitate the processing and harmonisation of different spatial data for use in hydrological models. In the same session, Professor Iñigo Molina presented a poster describing a study on thresholding processes for the discrimination of bare soil in herbaceous crops. In this study, a multilevel algorithm (MultiOtsu) and two Vegetation Indices were used, highlighting the ‘Chlorofil Red Edge Index’, which, for these cases, has been shown to be an alternative to the widely known NDVI. Other participations by CEIGRAM members included the application of remote sensing to cover crop management (Raimondi et al.), to improving water and nitrogen use in cropping systems (Wang et al.) and to phenotyping wheat varieties (Raya-Sereno et al.).
The sessions and posters that were shared, as well as those that could be attended in a scientific programme full of interesting proposals for the sector, have provided valuable knowledge to think about new lines of work and have allowed contacts to be established for future lines of joint research at an international level.
