Czech User Forum 2

Discussion chaired by Lucie Šavelková, SZIF

State Agriculture Intervention Fund (SAIF) as a payment agency in the Common Agriculture Policy framework uses satellite and aerial images for on-the-spot checks and for actualization of LPIS (Land Parcel Identification System). SAIF verifies borders and eligible area of agriculture parcels, interprets crops on fields and checks other eligibility and crosscompliance conditions. For the same purpose SAIF uses GNSS technologies in the field.

Earth Observation represents the only technology that is feasible to provide tools for operational full country agricultural crop monitoring. Objective, guaranteed and up-to-date information about the type and state of agricultural crops grown on individual parcels may be delivered only if using time-series of optical and radar high resolution satellite imagery. Operational implementation of such an application is technically feasible and affordable purely when based on the imagery acquired by Sentinel 1&2 and Landsat 5&7 satellites.

DROMAS project is run within the ESA ARTES Integrated Applications Promotions programme. The feasibility study has been successfully concluded in 2015. The main outcome of the study was the design of two services - the Agricultural Crop Monitoring Service aims at national monitoring of agricultural crops and crop damage & agro-environmental degradation, whereas the Farming Management Service aims at local monitoring of agricultural crops to support farm management. The national service will be implemented within the demonstration project that has started in 2016

Invited speech

The CzechAgri study was jointly initiated in December 2015 by DG JRC, ESA and SZIF (The Czech State Agricultural Intervention Fund). It is set up as a proof-of-concept of what could be achieved in Europe by analyzing Sentinel imagery with the combined use of the national Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) and a sub-sample of IACS declarations for calibration and validation. CzechAgri intends to be an R&D contribution to the preparation of future Copernicus service components in support of Agriculture as recently proposed to the Copernicus User Forum by DG GROW.

CzechAgri is run within the ESA Sentinel-2 for Agriculture project managed by the Université Catholique de Louvain. The aim of the study is to demonstrate the unprecedented capabilities of the Copernicus Sentinels by pilot agricultural crop mapping at national scale in 2015 and 2016. Combined time series of radar Sentinel 1 and optical Sentinel 2 imagery (complemented by Landsat 5&7 imagery) will be processed and analyzed to provide full country crop map products covering the 2015 and 2016 crop vegetation season. The initial results at national scale will be presented including the independent accuracy analysis and comparison of SAR and multispectral data performance.