CAP Area Monitoring Services

Plethora of services relevant to area monitoring

CAP monitoring involves checking the crops and cultivation of all agricultural parcels in an area of interest, to determine whether farmers are fulfilling the commitments they made when requesting subsidies. Monitoring this process using satellite imagery requires identification of the parcels, detection of cultivation events and identification of crop types. The final result either confirms that the parcel is compliant with regulations (“green”), proves it to be non-compliant (“red”), or identifies the case as uncertain, which cannot be resolved with the standard pathway and requires follow-up (“yellow”). At the scale of millions of parcels processed several times a year, automated data analysis and case processing can massively aid the work of the paying agency.

While the unit of investigation is typically the parcel (a single closed polygon characterised by the same crop and cultivation performed at the same time), some tasks require analysis at the pixel level. Both levels can be served using satellite monitoring. The typical processing chain includes selection and pre-processing of input data (radiometric and geometric correction, cloud masking, outlier filtering), calculation of spectral indices for monitoring vegetation properties (typically NDVI but often also other indices), overlaying between spectral index rasters and the parcels from farmer claims, calculation of zonal statistics of spectral index time series within each parcel, classification to determine the cultivated crop, time series analysis to identify markers associated with cultivation events, and finally the evaluation of the findings against the requirements of the claim.

Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem can aid this process in four ways: