OEMC project use case: EO data and automated mapping for EU soil observatory
- Creators
- OpenGeoHub Foundation
Description
Jointly with the European Commission's JRC, OpenGeoHub is building a web-service with dynamic soil data that can be used to serve the EO soil observatory. JRC's European Soil Data Center is also behind one of the world's biggest soil monitoring systems called LUCAS Soil. One of the main objectives of the EO soil observatory is to develop EO-based solutions to help alert countries and individuals independently of the national systems (within weeks since some event such as major flood, erosion etc happens). The system needs are described in detail in "European Soil Data Centre 2.0: Soil data and knowledge in support of the EU policies".
Stakeholder needs:
- EO-data products that can be used to assess soil degradation processes such as soil erosion (gully, surface, landslides etc), soil compaction, salinization, chemical pollution, loss of SOC and loss of biodiversity.
- Computational tools for generating accurate predictions of soil erosion / soil degradation using ground observations and monitoring networks such as LUCAS soil.
Implementation steps include:
- Producing time-series of analysis-ready bimonthly / monthly biophysical indices for Europe,
- Producing computational frameworks for using LUCAS and national point data sets for the purpose of producing consistent spacetime predictions of key soil properties e.g. SOC,
- Testing and promoting in-situ technology for rapid collection of ground data e.g. through soil spectroscopy or similar
To help reach these goals, OEMC has organized an open hackathon as part of the ESA Symposium on EO 4 Soil Protection and Restoration 6–7 March 2024 at ESA-ESRIN center, Frascati, Italy. The two hackathons are fully documented on Kaggle and the data sets used are publicly available.