How spectroscopy from space will support world agriculture

The challenges of future global food production are characterized by a growing population, changing eating habits and climate change. Ecological intensification of global agriculture can avoid food shortage sustainably and preserve a minimum of nature. The paper describes logic and possible architecture of a global agricultural land management information system (ALMIS) as a means to implement ecological intensification. It shows that specifically hyperspectral remote sensing combined with complementing R/S sources is essential to provide the necessary data to derive, independent of location, the necessary farming information for sustainable, spatially explicit management of agriculture on the whole Globe.