Adopting standards for field data collection and data sharing enables communities to generate reliable data to support food security efforts. During the 44^th Symposium of the European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) highlighted the contribution of remote sensing to land cover and land use classification, crop mapping, yield estimation, drought assessment, and early warning systems for agricultural risk management.

The symposium was held from 26 to 29 May 2025 in Prague, Czech Republic. EARSeL is a scientific network that brings together European remote sensing experts from academia and the commercial sectors. This year’s symposium, specifically the workshop on agriculture, focused on discussing new and improved remote sensing approaches to support global food security.

FAO’s Geospatial team contributed to the discussion with a presentation that emphasized the importance of FAO’s proposed standards for the proper production and management of maps, particularly land cover. These standards are in line with FAO’s mandate and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 2: Zero Hunger.

Several challenges hinder the full potential of remote sensing, including data accessibility restrictions, high processing costs and time requirements, inconsistencies in spatial and temporal resolutions, atmospheric interferences such as cloud cover, and the need for extensive ground-truthing to improve classification accuracy during training and validation phases.

During the event, particular focus was given to the Agro-Informatics platform, which disseminates FAO products as well as the input data used for their generation.

Experts and specialists agreed that stronger collaboration between research institutions, policymakers and international organizations is essential to optimize the use of remote sensing applications for global food security monitoring and policy support.