Initiated in 1984, the Committee Earth Observing Satellites' Working Group on Calibration and Validation (CEOS WGCV) pursues activities to coordinate, standardize and advance calibration and validation of civilian satellites and their data. One subgroup of CEOS WGCV, Land Product Validation (LPV), was established in 2000 to define standard validation guidelines and protocols and to foster data and information exchange relevant to the validation of land products. Since then, a number of leaf area index (LAI) products have become available to the science community at both global and regional extents. Having multiple global LAI products and multiple, disparate validation activities related to these products presents the opportunity to realize efficiency through international collaboration. So the LPV subgroup established an international LAI intercomparison validation activity. This paper describes the main components of this international validation effort. The paper documents the current participants, their ground LAI measurements and scaling techniques, and the metadata and infrastructure established to share data. The paper concludes by describing plans for sharing both field data and high-resolution LAI products from each site. Many considerations of this global LAI intercomparison can apply to other products, and this paper presents a framework for such collaboration

MODIStsp is a new R package allowing automating the creation of raster time series derived from MODIS Land Products. It allows performing several preprocessing steps (e.g. download, mosaicing, reprojection and resize) on MODIS products on a selected time period and area. All processing parameters can be set with a user-friendly GUI, allowing users to select which specific layers of the original MODIS HDF files have to be processed and which Quality Indicators have to be extracted from the aggregated MODIS Quality Assurance layers. Moreover, the tool allows on-the-fly computation of time series of Spectral Indexes (either standard or custom-specified by the user through the GUI) from surface reflectance bands. Outputs are saved as single-band rasters corresponding to each available acquisition date and output layer. Virtual files allowing easy access to the entire time series as a single file using common image processing/GIS software or R scripts can be also created. Non-interactive execution within an R script and stand-alone execution outside an R environment exploiting a previously created Options File are also possible, the latter allowing scheduling execution of MODIStsp to automatically update a time series when a new image is available. The proposed software constitutes a very useful tool for the Remote Sensing community, since it allows performing all the main preprocessing steps required for the creation of time series of MODIS data within a common framework, and without requiring any particular programming skills by its users