PROPOLE 2.0 – EO based crop monitoring services for precision agriculture

Situation

Modern agriculture faces challenges in efficient management and sustainable production, requiring precise, timely, and comprehensive information on crop and soil conditions

Farmers and agronomists need reliable data to optimize agrotechnical practices, target input use, and minimize environmental impacts. A common issue when working with optical satellite data is incomplete coverage of target areas due to cloud cover, which can lead to data gaps and complicate interpretation and use for continuous monitoring and decision-making.

Consequently, there is a clear demand for consistent, regularly updated, and easily interpretable geospatial products that integrate the latest advances in Earth Observation and provide specific, tailored information for variable-rate applications, yield prediction, assessment of crop nutritional status and water regime, and long-term soil quality monitoring.

Solution

Gisat's PROPOLE 2.0 portfolio is a comprehensive suite of advanced EO based crop monitoring services designed to support precision agriculture

At its core are an automated calculator for a wide range of vegetation indices and biophysical parameters (e.g., LAI, chlorophyll content, water content, biomass) and robust methods for gap-filling in data caused by cloud cover, combining interpolation and machine learning-based predictive modeling. This ensures the delivery of complete and consistent datasets.

The main products are organized into thematic modules:

• Crop Variability Module: Provides maps of current relative spatial crop variability (e.g., based on LAI or CDM) for a given parcel and time, including anomaly detection. It also offers long-term crop variability analysis (over the last 5+ years) to identify stable production zones and support decisions such as variable-rate seeding.
• Irrigation Module: Includes products mapping the current spatial variability of water content in the canopy (based on CWC or LWC) and an assessment of the absolute crop water status, considering the amplitude and duration of water anomalies.
• Yield Module: Offers final yield prediction at the parcel level (and optionally its spatial variability) for key crops (e.g., winter wheat, rapeseed, spring barley, maize) based on time series of biophysical characteristics and meteorological data. Predictions become more accurate as the season progresses.
• Crop Nutrition Module: Provides an estimation of crop nitrogen status (NNI index) and maps biomass increment between satellite acquisitions, serving to verify fertilization impacts or plan future applications.
• Soil Module: Offers access to maps of soil organic matter content, its variability within parcels, comparison with reference statistics, and long-term development trends (since 1985), updated at five-year intervals.

Results

PROPOLE 2.0 services allow farmers to make more informed and effective decisions 

The implementation of services from the PROPOLE 2.0 portfolio offers farmers and agronomic advisors numerous tangible benefits. Regularly delivered maps of current and long-term crop variability allow users to optimize variable-rate applications of fertilizers, plant protection products, or seeds, leading to input savings and more uniform crop development. Anomaly detection facilitates the timely identification of problematic areas requiring specific intervention. 

The irrigation module provides crucial data for targeted and efficient water resource management, especially during drought periods. Yield prediction offers a valuable tool for harvest planning, logistics, and marketing strategies. Information on crop nutritional status, particularly nitrogen, and biomass increment monitoring allow for the optimization of fertilization and maximization of its effectiveness. Long-term monitoring of soil organic matter content and its trends supports sustainable soil management and decision-making on measures to improve soil quality. Overall, PROPOLE 2.0 contributes to increasing the efficiency of agricultural production, reducing costs, and lessening environmental impact.