CropMon – Enabling an operational Sentinel-2 Crop Monitoring Service

In response to growing pressure on the world’s crop supply, an increasing demand exists for agricultural monitoring providing intelligence for: i) the agricultural industry for pre-financing, managing water demand and crop development as well as insurances; ii) the responsible public organisations at regional, national and trans-national for formulating directives and laws, controlling and reporting obligations; iii) the international development agencies and financing institutions for assessing development requirements, ensuring efficient developments and monitoring food security.

EO data contribute to crop monitoring as a proven source for transparent, timely and consistent information on agricultural productivity at field, regional or national scale. The project’s long-term aim was to develop the basis for an operational crop monitoring service applying time-series Copernicus Sentinel-2 data (crop type / area identification, crop condition monitoring).

EO-based monitoring of crop type, status and its change over time is a key information for agricultural stakeholders and used, amongst others, in crop growth models to predict crop yields and eventually grain prices.

The dedicated exploitation of S-2 observations provides operational crop monitoring information solutions enabling a dedicated processing and dissemination capacity. Specifically, CropMon enabled:

1) supercomputer ready processing chains for the identification of crop types / cropland areas as well as for the monitoring of crop conditions and

2) an online, interactive service order and delivery platform via the Austrian Earth Observation Data Centre (EODC)