ENVISION service supporting the business case of Belgium is:
- Soil Organic Carbon monitoring
The Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) service aims to:
- Deliver Verified top-soil (0-10 cm) qualitative Soil Organic Carbon estimations,
- Visualize SOC spatial variability at parcel, area, and regional level, and to
- Support the further collection of SOC measurement data, as a way to improve the SOC model and to validate its results.
The service will be used to monitoring CAP’s soil requirements (in terms of soil organic carbon) and support the maintenance of soil organic matter level relative to the current and future CAP requirements.
End-users may use service results to get insights and information on tillage, drainage, and overall agricultural management practices.
Specifically, the SOC service will deliver:
- Image tiles present the SOC spatial distribution (WMS)
- Estimated SOC mean values per agricultural parcel as those exist in LPIS systems. The agricultural parcels will behave as existing geometry objects and will be selected by the end-users.
- Estimated SOC mean values per area of interest (AOI). AOI will be created by the end-users and will act as new geometry objects. Estimated SOC mean values per administration boundaries, for example, the Flemish Region, and per crop type. Existing administrative boundaries will be used as input to the micro-service.
Additionally, the SOC micro-service will provide two extra abilities:
- To calculate and return SOC changes for a specific period. Condition for this is the existence of SOC maps that represent the SOC values in the range of the requested period. This function will support the PAs to effective monitoring of the SOC in time, classify and encode the changes using CAP implementation policy criteria.
- To provide SOC measurement data, coming from in-situ measurements and metadata that describe the applied collection methodology, etc. The incoming SOC data together with the new satellite data streams can be used by the SOC image providers to further evaluate and tuning the SOC model and deliver new SOC images with higher accuracy/quality.