Regular monitoring of grassland productivity is important for a sustainable use of their resources and understanding how ongoing and predicted extreme events impact their productivity and the adaptations needed in their management. Recognizing these issues, we propose the development of a powerful and modular digital infrastructure able to provide geospatial products in support of grassland monitoring in Serres regional unit, Greece. The current work firstly aims at providing a tool enabling rapid Earth Observation data access, handling, and pre-processing by significantly facilitating the generation of analysis-ready data using Sentinel-2 imagery data allowing to build the first version of a grassland-oriented Data Cube. The overarching objective is to develop biomass and environmental related proxies tailored to grassland ecosystems, using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and data mining techniques to make the most out of optical high spatial resolution data for the derivation of grassland biophysical parameters and degradation indicators. The final products are summarized in a land use map area of the area derive from a convolution neural network classification algorithm, as well as a set of vegetation indices and bare soil products from the period from 2020-2022. The output will be used to provide technical recommendations to farmers to make better management decisions and will inform index-based environmental assessment, letting farmers avoiding land abandonment or overgrazing and the related consequences on landscape conservation, soil quality, and biodiversity.
The importance of monitoring soil properties is constantly increasing among researchers and policy-makers. In this context, it is imperative to identify cost effective and reliable strategies for soil mapping compared to the costlier traditional solutions. A wide range of tools are becoming available that enable better utilization of Earth Observation capabilities to monitor the soil ecosystem. This work is an effort of assessing the potential of Sentinel-2 imagery data for mapping Soil Organic Matter (SOM) contents and investigating the possibilities of its enhancement through ASTER derived information. The rural area around the lake Zazari, located in the Western Macedonia district of Greece, was chosen as study area. Initially, pixel-wise vegetation indices (NDVI and NBR2) were calculated, utilizing a local version of the CEOS Open Data Cube for masking Sentinel-2 bare soil pixels extending a three-year period (2017–2019). The generated mask was used to extract soil spectral signatures at the image level over selected 100 field samples. The resulting time series was expanded through the conjunction of ASTER Thermal InfraRed bands by matching the exact data acquisition dates of two platforms. The conclusive part of the work contains the application of regression modelling to effectively assess soil variables. The local Partial Least Square regression algorithm was chosen, due to its characteristics of performing inherently local predictions. Five-fold cross-validation technique was used for reporting the models’ accuracy, which was assessed through R 2 coefficient, RPIQ ratio and RMSE. The model estimated SOM values among a synthetic bare soil composite image that was acquired over study area’s agricultural fields. Two models were trained and compared; one over Sentinel-2 imagery bands that were used as the predictor variables’ set and a second over an expanded predictor variables’ set, including ASTER thermal bands. The results signified evidence of accuracy increase of SOM content assessment, through spaceborne imagery analysis.
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