From regional to parcel scale: a high-resolution map of cover crops across Europe combining satellite data with statistical surveys

The reformed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of 2023-2027 aims to promote a more sustainable and fair agricultural system in the European Union. Among the proposed measures, the incentivised adoption of cover crops (CCs) to cover the soil during winter provides numerous benefits such as improved soil structure and reduced nutrient leaching and erosion. Despite this recognised importance, the availability of spatial data on CCs is scarce. The increasing availability of field parcel declarations in the European Union (EU) has not yet filled this data gap due to its insufficient information content, limited public availability and a lack of standardization at continental scale. At present, the best information available is regionally aggregated survey data, which although indicative, hinders the development of spatially accurate studies. In this work, we propose a statistical model relating Sentinel-1 data to the existence of CCs at the 100-m spatial resolution over the entirety of the EU and United Kingdom (UK) and estimate its parameters using the spatially aggregated survey data. To validate the method in a spatially-explicit way, we compare predictions to farmers' registered declarations in France, where the adoption of CCs is widespread. The results indicate a good agreement between predictions and parcel-level data. When interpreted as a binary classifier, the model yielded an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.74 for the whole country.

FENDRICH Arthur;  MATTHEWS Francis;  VAN EYNDE Elise;  CAROZZI Marco;  LI Zheyuan;  D'ANDRIMONT Raphael;  LUGATO Emanuele;  MARTIN Philippe;  CIAIS Philippe;  PANAGOS Panos; 

2023-03-08

ELSEVIER

JRC131295

0048-9697 (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969723009166,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC131295,   

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162300 (online),