Data & Processing

Sen4CAP as a Service on CREODIAS

Sen4CAP aaS

Designed to fulfill the needs of agricultural paying agencies and all national and European stakeholders of the CAP Policy, Sen4CAP can be beneficiary for everyone interested in monitoring environmental changes and agricultural activities.

The Sen4CAPaaS solutions takes full advantage of Sen4CAP and the EO Cloud infrastructure.

  • The system comes ready to use as prepared VM images
  • It is available on subscription bases as a full-managed package including EODATA, managed cloud services and expert premium support.
  • Users can directly access a complete repository of satellite data while harnessing the processing capabilities of the computing cloud. This significantly accelerates the processing and allows the usage of multiple datasets also back in time.

The managed cloud services support fully operational workflows including backup strategies and parallel instances for testing of new software versions and variations of parameter settings.

Users can select on the EO Cloud an already prepared Virtual Machine (VM) image on which the latest stable Sen4CAP software is installed and checked.

The VM is configured and ready-to-use. It not only includes Sen4CAP, but it is also equipped with all additional software components required for Sen4CAP (e.g. PostgreSQL Database and the MAJA processor) execution. Furthermore, it is connected with all EO data collections, which are needed by the Sen4CAP:

  • Sentinel-1
  • Sentinel-2
  • Landsat-8
  • Different DEMs and SWBD (Water Body) data were also integrated

Once logged into the VM, the user can immediately run the Sen4CAP software and benefits from both the direct access to the comprehensive Copernicus Sentinel satellite data repository and the dynamically scalable processing opportunities of the CREODIAS cloud computing environment. The VM with Sen4CAP can be accessed e.g. through web browser or Remote Desktop using X2Go Client.

To select the size (virtual machine flavor and storage) of infrastructure for the area you want to monitor, contact our sales department sales@creodias.eu. Sample offers with recommended size of cloud environment is available here.

Check by monitoring for CAP

The European Union aims with CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) at a continuous improvement of a sustainable and growing European agricultural productivity while ensuring a decent standard of living of big and small farmers within the EU.

The Check by Monitoring is an important CAP instrument to supporting this policy. However, it is a challenge to get the required information in time and with the required reliability and timeliness:

  • Big areas need to be checked
  • Standard methods with in-situ inspection are expensive and time-consuming and can cover only a small percentage of the total of agricultural parcels

Remote sensing has become an established technology to address these challenges, recommended by European Court of Auditors. Especially the European Copernicus Programme with Sentinel satellites together with the dedicated open-source application Sen4CAP form a unique solution to support European and national CAP stakeholders.

Sen4CAP uses high resolution satellite images from the Copernicus programme to regularly monitor individual fields and large areas at the same time. It is an end-to-end processing and analysis pipeline which gives users access to validated algorithms, products, workflows and best practices for agriculture monitoring. Sen4CAP follows a modern and modular approach and thus offers to its users the possibility to rapidly establish further high level products tailored to regional needs.

System overview

The Sen4CAP system consist of a Earth Observation (EO) processing system linked with a visualization tool. It is open-source, allowing any user to generate, at his own premises and in an operational way, products tailored to his needs. The Sen4CAP EO operational system is a standalone processing chain which generates a set of products for agriculture monitoring from Sentinel-2 (S2) L1C, Sentinel 1 (S1) Single Look Complex (SLC) and Landsat 8 (L8) L1T time series. These agriculture monitoring products consist of:

  • cultivated crop type maps, generated several times during the agricultural season and delivered 10 days after the end of the acquisition period;
  • biophysical vegetation status indicators consisting of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction-Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR) and the Fraction of Vegetation Cover (FCover) describing the vegetative development of crops;
  • grassland mowing product, generated at regular intervals during the agricultural season and delivered 5 days after the acquisition of the last image of the interval;
  • agricultural practices monitoring product, generated at regular intervals during the agricultural season (with a main time step at the end of the period of required compliancy according to the national Ecological Focus Area (EFA) definition) and delivered 5 days after the acquisition of the last image of the interval and one month after the end of this required compliancy period.

The Sen4CAP EO system is composed of a set of independent processing modules orchestrated by a data-driven approach. These modules are composed by a set of tools which can be re-used into other systems. The logical data flow and the main interfaces of the Sen4CAP operational system is provided in Figure 1.
 

 

 

Figure 1: Operational workflow Sen4CAP system