Intelligent eyes in the sky keep watch over sustainable agriculture
The agricultural sector ensures the EU’s food security while providing jobs and contributing to EU economies – yet the future of agriculture is not ‘secure’. Crops are threatened by increasingly frequent and severe weather events, farmers’ incomes are already low compared to non-agriculture sectors, and the sector faces challenges in transitioning towards more sustainable practices. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) addresses these issues with income support for farmers, market measures to deal with difficult market situations, and rural development measures. It accounts for almost a quarter of the EU budget. The EU-funded ENVISION project developed digital tools and technologies, leveraging Earth observation data and other sources to help the EU to monitor CAP compliance and farmers to manage their crops more sustainably with greater resilience.
Satellite and other data support predictive models and visualisation
The open source ENVISION platform uses Copernicus satellite imagery and land parcel identification systems, enhanced with farmers’ input. “For efficient organisation and analysis of Earth observation data, ENVISION leverages the cutting-edge Open Data Cube for Earth observation data processing. Advanced processing methods, machine learning algorithms and data augmentation techniques extract valuable insights from satellite imagery and ensure that our predictive models are robust and generalise well to new data,” project coordinator Anastasios Karakostas of DRAXIS Environmental explains. ENVISION’s suite of monitoring and compliance tools captures data on areas of interest and presents analytics in easy-to-use interactive maps. This supports CAP paying agencies and certification bodies in efficiently, affordably and continuously monitoring agricultural land all year round. The ENVISION mobile application is available for farmers on Android and iPhone online stores. “The open-source approach and our add-on development tool enables stakeholders to freely adapt and extend the platform’s capabilities to suit their unique needs, and ensures continuous platform enrichment by a diverse community,” notes Karakostas.
Comprehensive services for monitoring and compliance
ENVISION provides analytics on vegetation indices and soil indices time series, supporting assessment of crop-specific growth trends, soil health and soil erosion. Cultivated crop type maps leverage machine learning to classify crop types, enabling crop diversification monitoring, permanent grassland identification and more. The grassland mowing event detection service monitors farmers' compliance with the CAP's environmental and climate requirements and maintenance of permanent grassland. Soil condition monitoring provides estimations of top-soil qualitative soil organic carbon. Finally, the organic crop monitoring service accurately distinguishes between organic and conventional crops and enables crop growth monitoring.
Co-creation of tools for agricultural monitoring
“ENVISION revolutionises agricultural monitoring by integrating future customers as co-creators from the start, ensuring that the services meet end-user needs. This user-centric approach is pivotal in developing the advanced, market-ready solutions,” notes Karakostas. Pilot user Aušrius Kučinskas of the National Paying Agency, Lithuania confirms the success of this approach: “ENVISION’s products and services have delivered significant added value, especially in the implementation of the CAP. The remarkable benefits of sanctions prevention, reduced workloads, fewer on-site inspections, cost savings and enhanced crop management have had a profound impact on our operations…and we foresee a future where their algorithms become an organisational standard for CAP compliance monitoring.” ENVISION’s outcomes should significantly increase the sustainability of the agricultural sector by enabling continuous and comprehensive monitoring of environmental and climate variables at national level, fostering effective land management and safeguarding ecosystem services.
Keywords
ENVISION, CAP, agriculture, Earth observation, certification bodies, climate, paying agencies, predictive models, Common Agricultural Policy, crop monitoring, land parcel identification systems
