EO and RPAS data for precision agriculture and cost-effective crop management

The KORE project used satellite Earth observation and Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) data to augment a precision agriculture service providing cost-effective crop management advisory tools with a high spatial and temporal resolution to agronomists and farmers. The project covered the development of a framework within which several complementary data sources could be integrated with existing farm management solutions. KORE also prepared the exploitation of free data from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. This was accomplished by adding an Earth observation imagery data stream into the “EssentialsMap” service. Large variations in a field were detected automatically, prompting the agronomist to survey the field with a micro-RPAS. The resulting high resolution maps were used to give targeted crop advice or to produce variable rate applications of crop inputs including fertilisers. The KORE demonstration focused on agronomists so that the service could be refined with feedback from experts. A high-powered processing framework was vital to the development of KORE as a fully operational service. Access to large EO datasets was needed, together with bulk processing and integration with the existing web-based commercial application.