References

Slovenia

Agency for agricultural markets and rural development

We have been running an automated and continuous Checks-by-Monitoring (CbM) process with the Slovenian Paying Agency for the second year now. Starting the activity in 2020 in prototyping mode, we completed the first run of our production-ready application in 2021, performing analysis using all available observations on more than 800 000 parcels, a process now continued in this and coming years.

We provide, on bi-weekly basis, the following services:

signal processing of the Sentinel-2 and Planet Fusion data (as an additional data source for small and inconclusive parcels),
training of the crop- and land-classification models,
computation of the markers,
producing the Traffic Light System results for the basic payment scheme which was covered by eleven different scenarios tailored for specific land-use or crop types and
provide these results to operators (using Expert Judgement Application) and farm holders (using Application for communication with farmers and a Geo-tagged photo app).

With the experience and confidence gained over the first year, we are now expanding the monitoring in Slovenia to winter & non-winter crops, and adding numerous new payment schemes. This requires developing new markers and improving the accuracy of existing ones.

Statistical office of the Republic of Slovenia

Together with partners from Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and University of Ljubljana, Faculty for Civil and Geodetic Engineering, we are working on markers for long-term monitoring of grasslands and meadows at the country scale. Due to requirements to look up to 20 years back in time there is a need to use a combination of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 as well as Landsat missions. Our focus is on:

identifying the yearly pixel-level counts of mowing events, and
detecting the yearly pixel-level bare soil presence, used for determining the age of permanent meadows.

The output of the project, in addition to marker results themselves, will be a Python package, which will be available to all statistical offices across Europe, to be able to perform these kinds of analyses at continental scale.

The project is co-funded by Eurostat.

Lithuania

National paying agency

Automatic agricultural field delineation tool was tested as a part of "Prefilled Application", aiming to benefit the farmers by using preliminary information on parcel boundaries and their attributes in order to reduce the time spent filling applications and the number of farmers' errors (part of H2020 NIVA project).

Within H2020 DIONE project we've been providing the area monitoring markers service for the Lithuanian agricultural parcels for two consecutive years. The Agency has validated the markers' outputs based on the in-situ data, focusing on crop group classification and mowing events detection.

Cyprus

Cyprus agricultural payments organization

Within H2020 DIONE project we've been providing area monitoring markers service for Cyprus Agricultural Payments Organization (CAPO) for years 2020, 2021 and 2022. We have closely cooperated in combining the markers' outputs into Traffic Light decisions.

Estonia

The agricultural registers and information board

We performed a country-wide feasibility study to check the applicability of the existing methodology and tools in the Estonian landscape to identify the required steps toward a fully operational Area Monitoring System.

We designed a Traffic Light System decision logic to identify:

the presence of ineligible areas - in particular permanent structures, buildings, roads etc.,
the presence of ineligible land use - overgrown areas where agricultural activity is not possible,
inconsistency between the declared land use category (permanent crop, permanent grassland, arable land) and state in the field.

In addition to Sentinel-2, tests were performed using Planet Fusion and Sentinel-1 6-day coherence signals.

Ukraine

As a part of the EO4UA initiative we have, in cooperation with Joint Research Centre, automatically delineated agriculture parcels for each of the years from 2016 to 2022. The data are being used to assess the impact of the war to agriculture in Ukraine.