Agriculture

EO applications result by merging together Big Data analytics, digital platforms, Artificial Intelligence, drones, crowd-sourcing and Internet of Things. These technologies can be translated into EO applications for the monitoring of agricultural practices like fertilizer and crop protection optimization, irrigation management, insurance services dealing with impact assessment of crop diseases and natural hazards, crop yield estimations and forecasts and pasture monitoring. EO applications represent reliable management tools for sustainable, climate-neutral agricultural services.

MEEO has been contributing in making agriculture more resilient and sustainable since its foundation. 

Earth Observation and climate data provide crucial support in improving agricultural practices making them more sustainable for what concerns environmental impact, and more resilient for climate change and global warning adaptation. MEEO’s agriculture support services include crop status monitoring by means of the extraction of vegetation indexes and water indexes, climate parameters monitoring like precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration and soil moisture. The analysis of precipitation, temperature and soil moisture are used to support irrigation management. Long time series of environmental parameters allow identifying extreme events and probability to support insurance practices.

Recent research projects dealing with this theme are PREMIA which is about climate risk estimation in agriculture and DATABIO which is about the crop impact estimation of weather extreme events.