In the frame of the SnapEarth project, EarthAgriculture pilot will improve the performance of the existing Sen2-Agri and Sen4CAP processing chains (and potentially of other processing chains from systems also based on the Sen2-Agri core), using services offered by the SnapEarth project. The main benefits are:

• Providing a self-service Web portal simplifying the use of this services and the decision making;
• Use EarthSignature land cover database to generate samples as an input of one processing chain;
• The processing framework (SafeScale) and the computing infrastructure deployed on Copernicus DIASes;
• Bring together processing chains from several systems.

As a consequence, EarthAgriculture proposes to agriculture users a set of added values services to support agriculture monitoring activities:

• Reports and statistical analysis of the vegetation status over the crop area into an Area of Interest over a season;
• Reports and statistical analysis of the vegetation status over several crop types into an Area of Interest over a season.

These services will be based on the following products:

• Vegetation Status Indicators: Sentinel-2 based vegetation indicators informing about the evolution of the green vegetation corresponding to the crop vegetative development (NDVI time series, mono- and multi-temporal Leaf Area Indices – LAI);
• Dynamic Crop Mask: A Sentinel-2 based crop mask that consists in a binary map separating annual cropland areas and other areas, thus corresponding to a mask over annually cultivated area. This binary map will be produced along the agricultural season on a monthly basis, to serve for instance as a mask for monitoring crop growing conditions, as basis for sampling stratification and for agricultural extension;
• Crop Type Map: A Sentinel-2 based map of the main crop types in a given region, with a Minimum Mapping Unit of 0.01 ha and provided along with several quality flags. The crop types are classified over the cropland area identified in the cropland mask. The map is generated twice over the season, with a first delivery at the middle of the season and the second one at the end;
• Cultivated crop type map at parcel level - The objective of this product is basically to discriminate crop types or crop type groups. Its level of thematic details and its format vary depending on the use case. Cultivated crop type map can be useful for assessing compliance with several CAP subsidy schemes or support measures:
  • crop diversification, by (i) indicate if the number of crops is higher than 2 or 3 at the farm-level and (ii) if the percentage distribution is compliant with regulation thresholding values at the farm-level,
  • permanent grassland by contributing the mapping of “grassland” or “permanent grassland” classes at the farm-level or at the national scale,
  • EFA - catch crop, EFA - nitrogen-fixing crop and EFA - land lying fallow, by providing the total area of catch crops and/or nitrogen-fixing crops and/or fallow at farm-level,
  • land abandonment, by contributing to an indicator of well-maintained or not abandoned fields,
  • claimless system, to support to pre-fill aid declarations.
• The Agricultural Practices Monitoring - aimed at (i) the identification of the agricultural practices of crop harvesting and ploughing of grasslands, and (ii) the comparison of farmer declarations of fallow lands or the growing of catch-crops/nitrogen-fixing crops, against remote sensing data. The extent of analysis is parcels of sizes greater than 1 ha, on which agricultural practices and compliance with national regulations are required to be checked.
• Grassland Mowing - the objective of this product is to detect the mowing events with data ranges at parcel-level. It can be useful for assessing compliance with several CAP subsidy schemes or support measures.
• The Cloud-free Reflectance Composite - provides a cloud-free temporal synthesis of surface reflectance values in the 10 Sentinel-2 bands designed for land observation. It also contains several masks that help appraising its quality.

These products are provided as-is and also used to generate statistics over an Area of Interest (AOI: a country, a regional state or a farmer area) and a season. These statistics will contain for example the vegetation status over various crop types or the variation of crop surface between different dates.