The MARS project and the MCYFS
Within the EC the DG AGRI is responsible for the implementation of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) regulations, for evaluation of their consequences and for the control on the European Agricultural Guarantee Guideline Fund (EAGGF). According to De Winne (1994), the collection of national and regional statistics on land use, land use changes and agricultural production is a prerequisite for this evaluation and control.
Information on land use, inter annual land use changes and yields is routinely collected by various national statistical services, which convey this information to the statistical office of the EC, EUROSTAT. However, collection and compilation of these agricultural statistics is time consuming. In exceptional cases, these statistics are available some months after the end of the season, however, generally it takes one or even two years before this information is available in the EUROSTAT databases (Supit, 1999). Another problem is the heterogeneity in agricultural statistics at EU and country level. This causes difficulties in collecting, comparing and aggregating the data at Community level affecting timeliness. This problem is accentuated by the EU enlargement process.
To assist DG AGRI and EUROSTAT in executing their tasks (i.e. EAGGF control; evaluation of the CAP effects on agriculture; collection of agricultural statistics), the Council of Ministers of the EU on 26th September 1988 approved a ten-year research and pilot project: the MARS project (Meyer-Roux and Vossen, 1994). Within the MARS Unit, the MARS-STAT activity concentrated on the assessment of crop yields and production volumes of various crops within the EU based on meteorological analysis, agro-meteorological simulated crop growth indicators, low-resolution satellite data and statistical analysis developing and using the MCYFS.
In the period 1988 – 1993, the MCYFS was designed and implemented following two different lines. The first (previously known as action 2) was a European wide system to qualitatively monitor crop status and to provide warnings in case abnormal growth conditions were observed, using data derived from the NOAA-AVHRR meteorological satellites. The most frequently used satellite-based indicators were vegetation indices (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)). These indices could be applied as qualitative indicators for biomass development and consequently crop yield (Meyer-Roux and Vossen, 1994).
The other line (previously known as action 3) was based on observations at the earth's surface, using agrometeorological models and ground surveys. The main goal was to monitor weather and crop conditions in order to assess the effect of weather on crop conditions, and to make early yield and production estimates per country and/or large region. To this goal the agrometeorological crop growth simulation model WOFOST was combined with a GIS and a yield prediction routine to form the Crop Growth Monitoring System (CGMS). CGMS was therefore developed in the first stage of the MARS project. In a second stage, CGMS had to be refined and enlarged and then included into a larger concept which is the MARS Crop Yield Forecasting System , using amongst others remote sensing information as input (Meyer-Roux and Vossen, 1994). The System was defined as operational in 1998, and the main operational activities (basically data purchase and acquisition, system running and maintenance of a web site) were outsourced through public tender procedures in 2000. The JRC (MARS STAT Action) is in charge of r&d, technological improvement, main output quality control, the agro-meteorological analyses, crop yield forecasts and the publication of the MARS bulletins.
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