Uso de imágenes SENTINEL para la monitorización de prácticas agrícolas y su contribución a la iniciativa “4 por 1000” de incremento de carbono orgánico en el suelo
Project summary
The agricultural sector is the second emitting sector of Green House Gases (GHG) in the EU with 438,341 Mt CO2-eq, 10.1% of total GHG emissions (European Environment Agency, 2016). Intensive agricultural practices have depleted Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) until limits that severely affect vital soil functions such as fertility, water retention and aggregate stability, being widely accepted as a good indicator of soil quality (Podmanicky et al. 2011). Agricultural SOC comprises around 10% of total SOC stored in soils, which correspond to more than three times the C stored in the atmosphere. In this context, it is not surprising that during COP21 (Paris 2015), the ‘4 per 1000’ initiative was launched, which aim is to increase in 0.4% the content of SOC per year in the first 30-40 cm of soil, encouraging agro-ecological practices that increase the quantity of organic matter in soils. If this objective would be reached, the annual increase of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would be significantly reduced.
Spain is one of the most severely affected countries by soil erosion in Europe. Besides the critical impact of the physical environment, land use is one of the main drivers of soil degradation, mainly due to traditional agricultural practices and land abandonment. The new EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) aims to transition towards a sustainable food system, contributing to the EUs climate objectives and to protect the soil. In this context, the eco-schemes will be a new instrument in the CAP to support this transition, covering activities including tackling climate change, environment protection, and safer agricultural production systems. Following the most pressing challenges that Spanish agriculture is currently facing, the eco-schemes proposed by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food are focused on carbon farming and agroecology. The implementation of sustainable agriculture practices, such as conservation agriculture and crop rotation, will improve soil quality and enhance ‘carbon sequestration’.
The implementation of the corresponding sustainable agricultural practices needs to be verified by the competent authority. Field inspections are expensive and time-consuming when large areas have to be assessed. On 22 May 2018, the EC adopted a new regulation for 2020+ CAP payments that include the possibility of using Earth Observation (EO) data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 programs for monitoring farmers parcels and assess cross-compliance. This regulation opens the possibility to monitor the compliance with the farmers declarations at large scale and evaluate the success of the proposed policies.
This project addresses the need for large-scale assessment of agricultural practices and the evaluation of agricultural policies using free, full and open Sentinel satellite data and image segmentation, classification and regression techniques. Moreover, this project will generate scientific knowledge on the influence of different agricultural practices on soil organic carbon by developing a model to predict soil organic carbon from satellite imagery.