Image: Sen4CAP on CentOS
Sen4CAP (Sentinel for Common Agriculture Policy) system has been set up by ESA to develop an end-to-end processing and analysis pipeline aimed at the European and national stakeholders of the CAP, providing them with validated algorithms, products, workflows, and best practices for agriculture monitoring relevant for the management of the CAP.
The Sen4CAP software is available as open-source freeware and is very well suited to be run in a cloud-computing environment. A CentOS image with Sen4CAP open source software is included in the image pool available to the CODE-DE users. Any user can run the Sen4CAP software, benefitting both from the direct access to the complete Copernicus Sentinel satellite data repository and dynamically scalable processing opportunities of the cloud computing environment.
Sen4CAP uses high resolution satellite images from the Copernicus programme to regularly monitor individual fields and large areas at the same time. It is an end-to-end processing and analysis pipeline which gives users access to validated algorithms, products, workflows and best practices for agriculture monitoring. Sen4CAP follows a modern and modular approach and thus offers to its users the possibility to rapidly establish further high level products tailored to regional needs.
These agriculture monitoring products consist of:
- Cultivated crop type maps, generated several times during the agricultural season and delivered 10 days after the end of the acquisition period.
- Biophysical vegetation status indicators consisting of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction-Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR) and the Fraction of Vegetation Cover (FCover) describing the vegetative development of crops.
- Grassland mowing product, generated at regular intervals during the agricultural season and delivered 5 days after the acquisition of the last image of the interval.
- Agricultural practices monitoring product, generated at regular intervals during the agricultural season (with a main time step at the end of the period of required compliance according to the national Ecological Focus Area (EFA) definition) and delivered 5 days after the acquisition of the last image of the interval and one month after the end of this required compliance period.
The great advantage of running the system on a CODE-DE VM is that there is no need to download any Sentinel-1 or Sentinel-2 data, the Sen4CAP orchestrator queries the database and starts the pre-processors straight away.
Access and Availability
In order to gain access to Virtual Machines users need to take following steps:
- Apply for a quota using the CODE-DE portal
- Configure and launch an instance using CODE-DE Horizon Dashboard, its API or CLI
- Configure access to VM through a terminal or remote desktop software
Detailed, step-by-step instructions are available in the CODE-DE User Manual and in FAQs
