The overarching purpose of JECAM is to compare data and methods for crop area, condition monitoring and yield estimation, with the aim of establishing ‘best practices’ for different agricultural systems. The goal of the JECAM experiments is to facilitate the inter-comparison of monitoring and modelling methods, product accuracy assessments, data fusion, and product integration for agricultural monitoring. These international shared experiments are being undertaken at a series of sites which represent the world’s main cropping systems and agricultural practices. The approach is to collect and share i) time-series datasets from a variety of Earth observing satellites useful for agricultural monitoring and ii)  in-situ crop and meteorological measurements for each site.