Read the interesting article, from the e-shape pilot GEOGLAM and "dig" into the importance of crop calendars and how Earth Observation is a key lever for monitoring and detecting what is happening on the field.
Based on user need analysis, GEOGLAM started updating and developing agricultural services to monitor and improve sustainable agriculture in Europe. These services were demonstrated to and tested by end users over the past agricultural growing season.
Annual cropping systems are very dynamic by nature, where changes may occur in a very short time span. Obtaining these crop calendars at the parcel level is receiving more and more attention, and has now also been identified as an Essential Agricultural Variable by GEOGLAM, the Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative.
This information can be used in a wide array of applications. Yield prediction models, for example, depend on the exact definition of the phenological stage of the crop, in order to properly assess for example the impact of a drought on the expected yield. Governmental bodies, as another example, want to use this information to derive if a cover crop was planted and how long it was present on the field.
To this end, developing crop calendar extraction workflows has been a focal point within the e-shape project, in order to provide this information at the parcel level. Not only was the focus on the methodological developments, but also on how to make these service available on-demand, at the global scale.
More details on the outcomes and a story about crop calendar monitoring, one of the GEOGLAM initiatives to monitor the crop condition at a global scale is published here.
The e-shape project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 820852