Pioneering the use of Earth Observation for Agriculture Eco-Schemes

The project delivers innovative methods, products and services to support the European Commission’s New Common Agricultural Policy and its Eco-schemes.

About

One of the promising aspects of the New CAP is the introduction of Eco-schemes in the Pillar 1 of Direct payments and market measures. Eco-schemes offer a great opportunity to address agri-environmental concerns better and more effectively. They could help farmers to introduce new practices and evolve towards more sustainable models, and can be used to support climate-and environment-friendly sustainable farming practices.

The main objectives of the project are:

To develop innovative, high-quality EO-based products, indicators, methods, tools and/or services to support the European Commission’s New Common Agricultural Policy and its Eco-schemes
To demonstrate and validate the developed innovative methods, tools, products and indicators in collaboration with Paying Agencies, and be able to integrate them into a monitoring system of the new CAP and its Eco-Schemes

The project is implemented within the Earth Observation Science for Society programmatic element of the ESA FutureEO-1 Programme.

Methodology

Number of innovative datasets and methods will be used and applied in the project. They shall improve the quality and reliability of monitoring processes and the availability of reference data sets needed for method development and validation. The methodology development and demonstration activities are based on several key elements:

IoT Sensors

Use of IoT sensors for parcel based monitoring

Artificial Intelligence

Use of AI supported geotagged photo recognition

Datasets

Use of Copernicus Land Monitoring High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity products

Modelling

Application of rule-based decision-trees modeling and machine/deep learning approaches

Case studies

Five sustainable agriculture sub-practices have been selected. The method development and demonstration will be run in 4 countries according to the interest expressed by individual Paying Agencies.

Crop rotation (Czechia)
Land lying fallow (Netherlands, Czechia, Spain, Sweden)
Extensive use of permanent grassland (Netherlands, Spain, Sweden)
Winter soil cover and catch crops (Netherlands)
Managing crop water demand (Netherlands, Czechia)

The developed methodology and related products will address both single-year Eco-scheme related matters (e.g. yearly reporting requirements), as well as multi-annual and long-term Eco-scheme related matters. Large scale demonstration of the feasibility of the developed method/algorithm will be performed, the entire area of a smaller Member State or region in a larger state (> 20 000 km2)

Early adopters

Paying Agencies

National Paying Agencies are the key Early Adopters that will drive the project implementation by the definition of the user requirements, the scope and pilot regions for use case demonstrations and validating the added value of the EO based information in their working environments.

Farmers

Farmers represent another community that may benefit from the results of agricultural practices monitoring to be demonstrated in the project. As the consortium fully shares this vision, it was decided to build the second Early Adopters pillar represented by selected farmers from different countries.

Project funding

The project is funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) in relation to the “Pioneer Earth Observation apPLications for the Environment (PEOPLE) Lot-1” projects, funded by the Earth Observation Science for Society programmatic element of the ESA FutureEO-1 Programme.

Contacts

Project coordinator

Jan Misurec

Remote Sensing Expert

Gisat s.r.o.
Prague, Czech Republic
jan.misurec@gisat.cz
+420 271 741 935
www.gisat.cz

ESA Technical Officer

Zoltan Szantoi

Land Applications Scientist Science, Applications and Climate Department

ESA - European Space Agency
ESRIN, Frascati, Italy
zoltan.szantoi@esa.int
+39 06 941 80330
www.esa.int