Welcome to the video tutorial for ASAP — the Anomaly Hotspots of Agricultural Production early warning system developed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

In this short video tutorial, you will learn what ASAP is and what information it provides. ASAP is a decision support system for detecting crop production anomalies and for preventing food shortages. It monitors crop growth globally at different geographical scales and provides warnings based on anomalies of Earth Observation and weather data.

ASAP makes available a wealth of online information using a suite of three interactive platforms. The first is the Hotspots Assessment, the second is the Warning Explorer, and the third is the High-Resolution Viewer.

Hotspots Assessment

The Hotspots Assessment page is also the ASAP homepage, where a global map shows the countries that are classified as hotspots of agricultural production for the current month. You can see past assessments by using the timeline function. In March, for example, both the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa were facing agricultural production problems.

Below the map, a short narrative summarizes the global situation with highlights about the main agricultural production anomalies region by region. There are additional sections with the latest news and tweets related to ASAP, as well as special focus reports that illustrate specific hotspots such as major droughts and floods.

If you click on a country — for example South Sudan, one of the most severely affected in March — you go to the country assessment page. Here you have a short narrative about the current crop growth situation drafted by JRC analysts. You also have a large set of maps, tables, and graphs of vegetation and weather indicators providing a detailed overview of crop and rangeland conditions in the country.

Warning Explorer

If you are interested in the data behind the hotspots analysis, the second platform — the Warning Explorer — offers an interface to crop monitoring data at the sub-national level, updated every 10 days.

You can select the type of data and time period in the left menu. By default, the large map shows the latest drought condition warnings for areas where crops are currently grown. You can browse a set of indicators in raster format to identify more detailed spatial patterns for the selected date — for example, anomalies of cumulative rainfall over the last 90 days.

You can visualize maps and information for any decade in the last 10 years and switch from crop to rangeland areas. When you click on a map unit, new options become active in the menu: you can explore graphs and statistics for the selected sub-national unit in a dashboard with four panels. The help icon provides a detailed description of each information element.

If you select “Get stats for another unit”, you open an additional tab so that different units can be easily compared.

High-Resolution Viewer

For zooming into field level, you can open the third platform, the ASAP High-Resolution Viewer. This platform quickly loads high-resolution satellite data such as Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, made available by the European Copernicus Programme.

These are large data volumes that need to be handled by a cloud computing platform — in this case, Google Earth Engine. By default, a composite mosaic of the current month is loaded for the selected province. In the left menu you can choose sensor, composite, period, and layer. You can open multiple images in synchronized tabs to facilitate visual comparison.

In addition to visualizing high-resolution images, you can select a point to retrieve the corresponding NDVI time profile in a new tab. The profile in the upper section is connected to image snapshots in the lower section, linking the time dimension to the spatial context. Sentinel-2 snapshots for each date in the time profile allow you to quickly identify the dates with the highest image quality.

Instead of a point, you can also draw a polygon; in this case, statistics extracted are histograms of NDVI values for two given dates. Since we are working in a cloud environment, there is no need to download any data.

For each map or time profile, you can get a link that regenerates the active tab on the fly — useful for sharing with colleagues or including in a report.

For more details, there is a short online tutorial that illustrates step by step how to use the interface. Enjoy exploring ASAP, or check out the About page for more information.