Given strong year-to-year variability, increasing competition for natural resources, and climate change impacts on agriculture, monitoring global crop and natural vegetation conditions is highly relevant, particularly in food insecure areas. Data from remote sensing image series at high temporal and low spatial resolution can help to assist in this monitoring as they provide key information in near-real time over large areas. The SPIRITS software, presented in this paper, is a stand-alone toolbox developed for environmental monitoring, particularly to produce clear and evidence-based information for crop production analysts and decision makers. It includes a large number of tools with the main aim of extracting vegetation indicators from image time series, estimating the potential impact of anomalies on crop production and sharing this information with different audiences. SPIRITS offers an integrated and flexible analysis environment with a user-friendly graphical interface, which allows sequential tasking and a high level of automation of processing chains. It is freely distributed for non-commercial use and extensively documented. SPIRITS (Software for the Processing and Interpretation of Remotely sensed Image Time Series) Herman Eerens, Dominique Haesen, Contact address: Boeretang 200, b-2400 Mol, Belgium (herman.eerens@vito.be, dominique.haesen@vito.be) 2013 PC Microsoft Windows (XP or later), Java (version 1.6 or higher) C, Java 240 MB http://spirits.jrc.ec.europa.eu/, https://rs.vito.be/africa/en/software/Pages/Spirits.aspx Free for non-commercial use Manual, tutorial with test data, training sessions 
Image time series processing for agriculture monitoring