On the Potential of the Galileo High-Accuracy Service (HAS) for Area Measurement in the Context of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

In the context of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), accurate area measurements and parcel delineations are of paramount importance. Area measurements enable the correct quantification of CAP subsidies, whereas parcel delineation is a fundamental prerequisite for the development of effective area monitoring system (AMS) processes, which use remote sensing (RS) techniques and products to verify the occurrence of specific agricultural practices and conditions. This paper investigates the effectiveness of different global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based methodologies for area measurement and parcel delineation. Specific focus is devoted to the Galileo high accuracy service (HAS), which is adopted for area measurement. Following the validation procedure adopted by the CAP, test parcels of different shapes and areas were defined using pegs and surveyed using professional-grade GNSS receivers. The experiments took place in the campus of the Astro-Geodetic Observatory of the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), Poland and involved the collection of raw GNSS observables and the computation of real-time kinematic (RTK) solutions, which were adopted as reference for the evaluation of the area errors. HAS corrections were also recorded using an E6-capable professional receiver and employed to compute the final precise point positioning (PPP) solution. The different solutions were computed including network RTK (NRTK), differential GNSS (DGNSS), HAS-PPP and single point positioning (SPP). For each solution, area errors were characterised from both a theoretical and an experimental point of view. Experiments show the potential of HAS for precise area measurement.

BORIO Daniele;  WEZKA Kinga;  SUSI Melania;  PARK Jihye;  NIKITIN Dmitry;  PICHUGIN Sergey; 

2025-10-06

Institute of Navigation (ION)

JRC143628

https://www.ion.org/publications/abstract.cfm?articleID=20415,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC143628,   

10.33012/2025.20415 (online),