VeriCAP

Why is it important?

Every year, paying agencies across the EU performs thousands of on-site control visits to field parcels across nations, to check if farmers report correctly on crop types and farm management practices according to the rules, procedures and eligibility requirements under the framework of EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). A single control visit is often not sufficient to cover the different agricultural activities over the year, thus increasing demands of time and resources for both paying agencies and applicants.

How can it help?

In line with the requirements of the 2020 CAP reform, aiming to modernize and simplify CAP requirements, satellite-based CAP monitoring solutions are increasingly being adopted to address the existing monitoring burden, as a cost efficient and effective solution to monitor crops and activities on field parcels at national level.

VeriCAP provides a streamlined and accurate check by monitoring (CbM) solution to monitor crop types and farm management practices according to CAP rules and requirements. VeriCAP has been developed, tested and operationally implemented at national level by the Danish Agricultural Agency (DAA), as an end-to-end CAP monitoring solution, enabling them to harmonise existing monitoring frameworks, reduce the need for field visits and ultimately, increase effectiveness and reduce costs.

VeriCAP provides an integrated, scaleable and flexible solution that serves the specific priorities and local conditions of each EU member state or regional authority.

What you get!

A powerful back-end image processing chain for handling petabytes of satellite data to validate parcel boundaries,  map and monitor crop types, grassland activity, harvest and ploughing and catch crops.

An advanced analytics toolbox for machine learning, deep learning and time series analysis and a sleek front-end web viewer for easy presentation of results and reporting.

A tailored and integrated solution conforming to local conditions and specific needs and requirements of the client. 

Typical customers?

National and regional paying agencies in the EU with a need to increase effectiveness in CAP monitoring in line with the requirements of the CAP2020 reform

Specifications

  • Six core CAP monitoring services:
      1. Parcel boundary validation
      2. Crop classification
      3. Grassland activity
      4. Ploughing
      5. Harvest
      6. Catch crops
  • Parcel level analysis as well as subparcel /pixelbased analysis and products – making best use of Sentinel 1/2, Landsat and commercial data sources, such as Planet data.

  • Markers updated on a daily basis and solution is operational on national scale
  • A sleek and customized interactive web viewer for easy data visualization, interpretation and reporting
  • The solution is available for any country or regional authority in the EU and flexible to be implemented based on the specific needs,  regulations, and regional conditions 

More information

Contact Lotte Nyborg (ln@dhigroup.com) for more information on VeriCAP.

EOatDHI part of the DHI GROUP

gras@dhigroup.com
+45 4516 9100

Agern Alle 5,
2970 Hørsholm,
Denmark

CVR: 36466871

Image composites for cloud-free monitoring

Image composites for cloud-free monitoring:

03 July 2018

Our very own junior geoinformatic specialist, Mike, just graduated from Aalborg University Copenhagen with a master’s degree in Geoinformatics.

His master thesis was done in close collaboration with our remote sensing experts here at DHI GRAS using Sentinel-2 imagery.

One main challenge for satellite imagery analysis is cloud cover, especially when working with time sensitive objects such as crop type classification and crop yield estimation.

Mike looked at how the implementation of image composites could be beneficial for cloud-free crop type monitoring and classification and found that creating monthly composites provided an increase of 23.5% in the total number of fields available for classification in the area of interest.

On a wider scale, the composites provide a big opportunity for monitoring and classification of land cover and land use in cloudy and rainy areas, such as the wet season in Africa or South-East Asia and could make crop yield estimates more reliable.

Below you can get an idea of how piecing together images from different days with differing cloud cover can result in an almost cloud-free image to do the further analysis on.

EOatDHI part of the DHI GROUP

gras@dhigroup.com
+45 4516 9100

Agern Alle 5,
2970 Hørsholm,
Denmark

CVR: 36466871