A Transferable Sentinel-based Agriculture Monitoring Scheme

Vasileios Sitokonstantinou, Ioannis Papoutsis, Charalampos Kontoes
2019 Zenodo  
Effective and efficient control over the subsidy payments, associated with the relevant agrarian policies and obligations imposed by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) requires systematic and timely monitoring of the agricultural landscape. In this regard, the introduction of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, offering open access to satellite data of unprecedented spectral, spatial and temporal characteristics, enable the development of reliable solutions for large-scale operational
more » ... culture monitoring systems. To this end, the RECAP project (Horizon 2020) developed an improved remote monitoring of CAP Cross Compliance and Greening obligations. Within this context, the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) has developed a Remote Sensing platform that implements on-demand, robust, transferable and efficient fully automated processing chains, towards evidence-based decision making in the CAP. Accurate crop classification serves as the main pillar of the overall system. The methodology uses a parcel-based satellite image (Sentinel-2) time-series approach, under a supervised classification scheme. Produced crop type maps are straightforwardly utilized for conformity checks on CAP's crop diversification requirements. An automated water pollution risk estimation method was also implemented to enable the identification of parcels prone to polluted water/soil runoff, accordant to the Statutory Management Requirements (SMR) of the CAP. Finally, Burn Scar Mapping algorithms have also been developed to directly monitor and control the stubble burning restrictions imposed by the policy. This agriculture monitoring scheme has been successfully applied in 5 diverse local scale pilot scenarios, within the context of the RECAP project. NOA seeks to extend and scale up the application of the scheme, by incorporating big data technologies and other mature ICT solutions for the monitoring of food security at national and international scales, this time under the scope of the H2020 project EOPEN.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.2549254 fatcat:frj5a5uup5cazj5kz7cwjytoou