Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (V0.1)
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UCL – Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (v0.1) Sentinel-2 Agriculture VOLUME 1 Function Name Signature Date Prepared by Project coordinator Pierre Defourny & Signed on original project partners UCL\ELI-Geomatics Croix du Sud, 2 bte L7.05.16 B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve BELGIUM UCL – Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (v0.1) This page is intentionally blank UCL\ELI-Geomatics Croix du Sud, 2 bte L7.05.16 B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve BELGIUM UCL – Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (v0.1) Sentinel-2 Agriculture CHAPTER 1 – Executive summary Function Name Signature Date Pierre Defourny & Prepared by Project coordinator project partners Signed on original UCL\ELI-Geomatics Croix du Sud, 2 bte L7.05.16 B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve BELGIUM UCL – Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (v0.1) Achieving sustainable food security for all people will need to grow agricultural production by 70% and up to 100% in developing countries relative to 2009 levels [RD.17]. In addition, it will require paying attention to the fact that agriculture not only provides food and feed but also generates products for the energy (biofuels), materials (wood, fibers, textiles) and chemicals industries and that the competition among these sectors (Food, Feed, Fuel and Fiber) for agricultural resources is increasing [RD.4]. The need to adapt agriculture to climate change and the importance of improving the efficiency of water and soil use in a sustainable manner are also major challenges ahead. To this end, the development of information technologies to monitor the agriculture and all related practices are essential to support policy makers and to provide a report on science-based options to improve the resources use efficiency (water, land, fertilizers, pesticides) in agriculture including for small farms. Today the development of better agricultural monitoring capabilities is clearly considered as a critical tool for strengthening food production information and market transparency thanks to timely data and information about crop status, crop area and yield forecasts. The enhanced understanding of global production will contribute to reduced price volatility by allowing local, national and international operators to make decisions and anticipate market trends with reduced uncertainty. This is also a prerequisite for the definition and monitoring of any agricultural policy. Satellite remote sensing is clearly a major source of information but there is large gap between the current practices of operational system and the scientific literature in the field of crop remote sensing. On one hand, this gap can be explained by the fact that most scientific experiments cover very limited test sites areas and that the scaling-up to national or international level is a very distinct research effort. On the other hand, the poor availability of suitable in-situ and satellite data over large scale hampers large scale demonstrations. The Sen2-Agri project is designed to develop, demonstrate and facilitate the Sentinel-2 time series contribution to the satellite EO component of the agriculture monitoring for many agricultural systems distributed all over the world. The overall objective is to provide to the international user community validated algorithms to derive EO products relevant for crop monitoring, open source software and best practices to process Sentinel-2 data in an operational manner for major worldwide representative agriculture systems. In the context of the Data User Element (DUE) programme, a user-oriented approach will drive the entire project in order to address concrete user needs and requirements and to develop the ownership of operational users around the world. In order to achieve such an ambitious objective in a limited time frame, the project has to rely on already well-established components (i) for user community involvement and the global network of agriculture sites, (ii) for the practice and knowledge of image time series pre- processing and (iii) for the processing toolbox development. First, the international agriculture community of practices which led to the development of the JECAM network and the GEOGLAM design is very well known to the consortium which is actively committed since the early days. Second, our consortium implemented multi-sensor pre-processing tools that fully use the multi-temporal dimension of the Sentinel-2 mission and has gathered a deep practice of the difficulties inherent to this work through the processing of thousands of images (Formosat-2, Landsat, SPOT4-Take5). Third, the consortium is also committed in the development and tuning of multi-temporal processing methods in the open source OrfeoTool Box. These points are a major asset of the proposed partnerships to bring further the current capabilities for agriculture monitoring in many countries thanks to the Sentinel-2 mission. UCL\ELI-Geomatics Croix du Sud, 2 bte L7.05.16 B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve BELGIUM UCL – Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (v0.1) The project outputs are of different natures. First, it will deliver a core of processing strategies combining advanced algorithms to produce four types of EO agriculture products and able to deal with the large range of agricultural landscapes observed around the world. Second, an open source and portable solution will develop from the OrfeoToolbox to convert the Sentinel-2 L1c data into cloud free multispectral surface reflectance mosaic and to relevant EO products thanks to the efficient implementation of the processing strategies. Using this software solution, the project will produce a set of 4 validated Sentinel-2 derived products for each of the 8 demonstration cases, including surface reflectance cloud free composite, cropland mask, crop type map and their respective area estimate, and crop specific vegetation status map. Each product will be delivered with quality flags which characterize their uncertainty. At least 5 sites well distributed over the world will provided as service demonstration for a full Sentinel-2 scene (290 x 290 km) by the consortium. For at least 3 demonstration cases at national scale, these sets will be locally produced using a system running at the premises of the end-user in the country. The performances of these products and the end-users assessment will be analysed and discussed in the validation report. More precisely, the suite of the Sen2-Agri EO products consists of a complementary outputs building on each other. While the generic users requirements in term of timeliness and accuracy reported in the Statement of Work are quite interesting, it is expected that they will have to be further defined according to the respective context, i.e. farming system complexity, already existing crop information, expected use of the information in the existing decision making process. Such an ambitious project is organized in three consecutive phases over a total period of 36 months. Each phase has specific objectives: Phase 1 corresponds to an initial design phase. It is dedicated to user requirements consolidation (task 1), data collection and pre-processing (task 2) and agricultural EO products specification, algorithms benchmarking and development and system development (task 3). Its duration is set to 12 months. Phase 2 aims at implementing the Sen2-Agri system, prototyping the agricultural EO products and assessing the performance of the developed system and products. It will also serve to prepare the phase 3 by defining the plan that will be applied to demonstrate the agricultural EO products with Sentinel-2 data. It corresponds to the task 4 and lasts 10 months. Phase 3 is mainly made by the final demonstration phase (task 5), which focuses on the demonstration of the Sentinel-2 agricultural EO products with the champion user groups in real life conditions. This phase also includes activities that promote the project (task 7) and draw the main conclusions from this project and deliver recommendations both to users and ESA (task 6). Length of phase 3 is planned to be 14 months. It is intended to start after the commissioning phase of the Sentinel-2 mission and could thus be delayed. The project will consider at least 4 types of sites. for phase 1: a set of 13 test sites for the phase 1, to be used in methods benchmarking and S2 data simulation; for phase 3: at least 5 sites among the 13 for local scale demonstration and in situ validation of the different EO agricultural products with Sentinel-2 data; UCL\ELI-Geomatics Croix du Sud, 2 bte L7.05.16 B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve BELGIUM UCL – Geomatics – 2013 Issue 0 – Rev 1 (v0.1) for phase 3 also: 3 demonstration cases dealing with national coverage and national diversity, 2 of them corresponding to African countries. additional voluntary sites either for local scale demonstration or nationwide production thanks to a proactive networking and appropriate technical support, “voluntary” meaning that these sites can use the developed S2-Agri processing chain but without receiving any funding (working on a voluntary basis) or technical support (even if their participation to the training workshop could be foreseen). The set of selected test sites will allow benchmarking the methods and algorithms with regard to the diversity of agro-ecological context, the various landscape patterns, the different agriculture practices and the actual satellite observation conditions (atmospheric pertubations, sun zenith angle and cloud coverage). The challenge is to allow identifying the most appropriate methods to scale up to the national and possibly the global scale. One of the most challenging aspect for automated algorithm is probably the spatial heterogenity of growing plants both within the field and across fields for a given crop due to local heterogenity of condition (diversity of practices, non synchronisation of practices, soil and weather heterogeneity, etc). For programmatic reason, it is also very important to select sites where in-situ and satellites time series are already available to start from the very beginning of the project with these data.