Large-Scale Vegetation Inventorying with Sentinel-2: A FabSpace 2.0 / Phi-Unet Educational Case at the University of Pavia

Recently, the number of organic rice producers in Europe has grown at such a fast pace that some doubts started emerging about the likelihood of such an “avalanche” transition, and about the full compliance of all actors involved with the strict regulations involved in organic crop growing [1]. In this situation, a “satellite monitoring and assessment” service could become a powerful instrument in fostering “non-compromising” organic farms and in re-assuring consumers. In this context, we conceived an innovative, Earth Observation (EO)-based service supporting the organic certification process by leveraging Copernicus data, that we called “Vialone” from a well-known traditional variety of rice. This resulted in a proposal submitted to a competitive European Space Agency (ESA) call for innovative EO applications, under the Kick-Start Activity (KSA) scheme [2]. The proposal was carefully assessed, and finally selected for funding under ESA Contract No. 4000124436/18/NL/NR; the project has just closed at the time of writing (April 2019) and we are now seeking funding for the next stages of this activity. Thanks to the feedback collected during the KSA project, we recorded a great interest by different actors in the organic rice supply chain about the possibility to reinforce the current organic certification process, which sometimes may experience credibility issues, by exploiting spaceborne monitoring. On the technical side, we have developed a series of tools to extract information relevant to certification from time series of Sentinel and in-situ data. Vialone can therefore play a fundamental role in the certification process: thanks to the satellite technology exploited by our platform, it is possible to collect data and generate useful information, which can also assist certifier institutions in certifying the organic product as such. In this way, some uncertainties due to “blind spots” in the certification process may be removed by providing third-party evidence. In the full paper, we will elaborate on this concept and present some of the tools developed during our project. References [1] Europol and the European Union Intellectual Property Office: “2017 Situation Report on Counterfeiting and Piracy in the European Union”. {online] Available at: https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications-documents/2017-situation-report-counterfeiting-and-piracy-in-european-union [2] European Space Agency Kick-Start Activity funding scheme. [online] Available at: https://business.esa.int/news/kick-start-activities-new-funding-opportunity-for-innovative-applications-ideas