Bioenergy crops agriculture is expanding globally as an alternative to petroleum-based fuels. This fact implies land use changes that must be monitored for evaluating potential environmental impacts, including the effect in greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration, and to help in the analysis of the biofuel production sustainability. Besides, biomass constitutes an essential climate variable, so sustainable management of biomass sources, like forests, contributes to the mitigation of climate change and to the protection of biodiversity and water resources.

Satellite remote sensed data have become an important source for vegetation biomass estimation and for monitoring land use change at different spatial scales. In relation to this, satellite data are usefull for many applications such as the identification of different land cover types, the classification of different crops, the evaluation of crop status, and the monitoring of deforestation and land use changes, i.e. the replacement of forest, croplands for food production or grasslands with cropland activities dedicated to biofuel production, stimulated by market forces that create incentives to producers.

The National Commission of Space Activities of Argentina (CONAE) is the only Federal Government Agency competent to propose policies to promote and execute activities in the space area with peaceful purposes throughout Argentina territory. It has to propose and implement a National Space Plan, which has the status of Strategic, establishing a clear state policy of national priority. All CONAE activities and projects are focused on generating appropriate and well-timed spatial information of our continental and maritime territory in order to contribute to the optimization of socio-economic requirements of our country. Pursuant to the global objectives established in the Space Information Cycles, CONAE performs its duties arranging activities in Courses of Action, among which can be mentioned “Ground Infrastructure” and “Satellite Systems”. For the first case, many activities are involved, but the most important one related to this presentation is to have spatial information, historical and current, available for the users from own satellite missions or from external satellite missions that can be obtained from different agreements that CONAE has with other Spatial Agencies from abroad. The second case, Satellite Systems, includes all activities to design, build and operate spacecrafts.

Currently, CONAE has under development, SAOCOM 1 Mission, composed by the SACOM 1A and 1B satellites, which integrates the SIASGE constellation (Italian-Argentinean Satellite System for Emergency Management) implemented jointly by CONAE and ASI, the Italian Space Agency. This System consists of the two Argentine SAOCOM 1 constellation satellites, each carrying a polarimetric L-Band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor, and the four Italian COSMO-SkyMed constellation satellites, each carrying an X-band SAR as main payload. SAOCOM 1 A is going to be launched on 2017, SAOCOM 1B, on 2018, and the four COSMO-SkyMed are already in orbit and operative.

This presentation will give an overview of the CONAE missions, the main characteristics of the remote sensing data that they will provide and the main agricultural and hydrological applications and products under development, based mainly on SAR data that can contribute to biomass estimations.