Development of an index-based insurance product: validation of a forage production index derived from medium spatial resolution fCover time series

Abstract

An index-based insurance is being developed to estimate and monitor forage production in France in near real-time based on a forage production index (FPI) derived from the fraction of green vegetation cover (fCover) integral, obtained from medium spatial resolution time series. This article presents the first step of the scientific validation implemented. The grassland parcels, the field protocol established to collect biomass production data, and the method used to get the fCover are described. Local ground measurements of biomass production are compared with FPI values obtained from high-resolution space-based images. Discrepancies between the two variables are quantified by the coefficient of determination, the mean square error and the normalised root mean square error. First, fCover derived from the four sensors are coherent demonstrating the ability of the algorithm used to provide a consistent way of calculating fCover. Second, for the whole data set, the scatter plot between FPI and biomass shows an acceptable correlation (R² = 0.75) improved when only taking into account data recorded up until the production maximum (R² = 0.81). Third, the analysis carried out on the scale of the parcels, grass species, period of mowing or climatic conditions reveals variability on the regression coefficients indicating that other explanatory variables should be integrated to better compute the FPI.

Keywords:

• validation
• fCover
• grassland production
• time series
• index-based insurance

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the French farmers for providing access their parcels for the field experiment, to CNES and THEIA for supplying and providing the SPOT-4 data in the framework of the Take-Five program (http://www.cesbio.ups-tlse.fr/multitemp/) – Version 2 and to Shawn Hutchinson for his help on reviewing our English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research consortium composed of three partners – Pacifica-Crédit Agricole Assurances, AIRBUS Defence & Space and Grameen Micro-Assurance.