Current on-going projects aim to develop environments to offer remote sensing data for users, however, without building any dynamic systems and analyses methods to facilitate interpretation and utilization of such vast datasets. Multidisciplinary expertise available in Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and National Land Survey of Finland (NLS) on e.g., analyzing remote sending data, understanding phenological events and utilizing statistical and artificial intelligence based methods enables development of automated processes that are needed to compile, process, interpret, analyze and report high amounts of satellite data in real time. Hence, our aim is to characterize the potential applications for agriculture, develop methods and assess their capacity and efficiency for real time, multifunctional and large-scale use in agriculture and to benefit from the opportunities provided by digitalization to improve estimations, compilation of statistics, monitoring and also shift in the scope from the farm and regional scale assessments to the field parcel scale.

Potential remote sensing based applications investigated in this project are: a) crop specific yield estimations during the growing season, b) identification of yield gaps, c) identification of crop species during the growing season, d) identification and/or quantification of the area under crop cover and different tillage systems as well as winter damage areas and timing of farming practices, e) identification of crop failures at the scale of field parcel. Information is available for users through Luke’s EconomyDoctor service (https://portal.mtt.fi/portal/page/portal/economydoctor) and the reports are dynamically produced in Finnish, Swedish or English. The users of the outcomes are: farmers, extension services, Agency for Rural Affairs (Mavi, also as a project partner), public administration, insurance companies, Luke’s Statistical Services and researchers.