Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS)
Description
Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS) is a global agricultural drought monitoring system developed and operated by United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (UN FAO). Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) developed the processing chain based on a methodology proposed by FAO. ASIS combines the expert knowledge on remote sensing, agronomy, agrometeorology and land use with big earth data, simulates the behaviors of domain experts and simplifies the interpretation of remote sensing data for a broader audience.
ASIS provides a collective quick-look indicators that facilitate the early identification of cropland/grassland with a high likelihood of water stress (drought). It is composed of two types of indicators: seasonal indicators and no-seasonal indicators.
Seasonal indicators are drought-detecting oriented. They include Agricultural Stress Index (ASI) to detect the severe agricultural drought, Drought Intensity (DI) to classify the severity of the drought and weighted Mean Weighted Mean VHI (wVHI) on which ASI and DI are derived. They are based on remote sensing data of vegetation and land surface temperature combined with information on agricultural cropping cycles derived from historical data and a global crop mask. The final maps highlight anomalous vegetation growth and potential drought in crop zones during the growing season. In ASIS, two cropping cycles (season 1/season 2) and crop/grassland zones are applied. The crop mask used is FAO GLC-SHARE.
Non-seasonal indictors include NDVI anomaly, Vegetation Condition Index and Vegetation Health Index which have no seasonal information applied can be used for broader vegetation monitoring.
The system operates on a 10-day cycle, providing pre-processed, publish-ready maps and zonal statistics every 10 days through the FAO GIEWS Earth Observation website.
13 geo-referenced datasets (raster format, global extent, 1 km resolution, 1984-present, over 16, 000 layers) are accessible via the
- FAO Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Portal,
- Web Map Service (WMS),
- ASIS ArcGIS Online
- and Google Earth Engine (GEE).
ASIS wins 2016 Geospatial World Excellence Award. In April 2024, ASIS has been recognized as a Digital Public Good by Digital Public Goods Alliance.
For more information, please visit GIEWS Earth Observation website at: https://www.fao.org/giews/earthobservation/index.jsp?lang=en