BEIJING — China’s agricultural remote sensing monitoring platform has provided information services to 147 countries and regions, its developer said on Aug 28.

Named CropWatch, the platform was launched in 1998. Based on remote sensing and ground observation data, the system independently assesses crop growth, yield and related information at global and national scales. It is currently one of the major international remote sensing monitoring systems for agriculture.

The system was initiated by the Aerospace Information Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A program named Digital Belt and Road, which is located in the institute, aims to customize the platform into an agricultural monitoring cloud platform for Belt and Road countries.

It will promote agricultural information sharing for Belt and Road countries to address the lack of information related to food security, according to the institute.