“Sentinel-2 for agriculture”: Supporting global agriculture monitoring

Developing better agricultural monitoring capabilities based on Earth Observation data is critical for strengthening food production information and market transparency. In 2014, the European Space Agency launched the Sentinel-2 for Agriculture project which aims at preparing the exploitation of Sentinel-2 data for agriculture monitoring through the development of an open source system able to generate relevant agricultural products. In order to meet this objective, the project carried out a benchmarking exercise to identify the best algorithms that will be in this system. For each product, a minimum of five algorithms were tested over 12 sites globally distributed. This paper gives a general overview of the project and presents in detail the benchmarking.