Mapping farming practices in Belgian intensive cropping systems from Sentinel-1 SAR times-series

The environmental impact of the so-called conventional farming system calls for new farming practices reducing negative externalities. Emerging farming practices such as no-till and new inter-cropping management are promising tracks. The development of methods to characterize crop management across an entire region and to understand their spatial dimension offers opportunities to accompany the transition towards a more sustainable agriculture. This research takes advantage of the unmatched polarimetric and temporal resolutions of Sentinel-1 SAR Cband to develop a method to identify farming practices at the parcel level. To this end, the detection of changes in backscattering due to surface roughness modification (tillage, inter-crop cover destruction ...) is used to detect the farming management. The final results are compared to a reference dataset collected through an intensive field campaign. Finally, the performances are discussed in the perspective of practices monitoring of cropping systems through remote sensing

Accuracy assessment of GAI retrieval from SPOT5 Take5 according to crop type and crop development (BELCAM)

BELCAM is a research project designed to exploit the new Copernicus satellites in the most relevant way for Belgian agriculture stakeholders. Building on the complementarity of satellite remote sensing technologies and local farm-sourcing, one of the research question is to investigate the sources of performance variability of the biophysical variables (BV) retrieved from remote sensing such as Green Area Index (GAI), fAPAR, biomass and chlorophyll content. Those BV are of major importance to estimate the Nitrogen content at the field scale and deliver practical information to the farmers on the Nitrogen status of the crops. BELCAM focuses on two crops for the Nitrogen advices : winter wheat and potato