What is Sen4CAP?

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union aims at sustainably improving the European agricultural productivity while ensuring a decent standard of living of farmers within the EU. Sen4CAP 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 to the management of the CAP.

The ready-to-use VM has been configured and connected with EO data collections, which are required by the Sen4CAP, also with additional software:

• Sentinel-1
• Sentinel-2
• Landsat-8
• SRTM (DEM) and SWBD (Water Body) data were also integrated
• PostgreSQL Database
• MAJA software

Our solution is offered as SaaS (Software as a Service) and does not require the user to install everything from scratch. Sen4CAP on CREODIAS saves time on configuring the VM environment, preparing the software, and gathering the data collections needed for processing. After the installation of an image on the VM, the environment is set up and accessed (through X2Go Client, for example), the Sen4CAP system can be started through a web browser or a command line and a new project can be defined.

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Solution advantages

As soon as a new project is activated, the Sen4CAP orchestrators start collecting satellite data and pre-processing. The great advantage of running the system on a CREODIAS VM is that there is no need to download any Sentinel-1 or Sentinel-2 data, the Sen4CAP orchestrator queries the database, creates symbolic links to the satellite data on CREODIAS, and starts the pre-processors straightaway. As the pre-processing of a large number of satellite images takes considerable resources, it takes some time (for one Sentinel tile takes from 30 min to 1 hour, depending on VM resources) for the first images to appear.

Sen4CAP allows you to generate many useful products supporting agricultural analyses:

Biophysical indicators such as NDVI

Helps to evaluate
state of crops

Crops type map

Allows to detect crop types
and compare them

Grassland mowing

Remote grassland
detection

Agriculture practice monitoring

Support for agricultural
treatment

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Customer support

In order to meet the needs of Paying Agencies and the companies supporting them, we provide assistance in the choice of the size of the environment and support the substantive knowledge about Sen4CAP software itself and the use of satellite data in it. Thanks to customer support and constant contact during the use of our service, we consult with software authors on all the information obtained in order to develop it continuously.

Thanks to these activities, we are number one, the first, and the only European cloud provider offering Sen4CAP solutions.

Examples of costs

Virtual Machine: 16 vCPU / 128GB of RAM memory. The time to process one Sentinel-1/2 tile on mentioned resources is about 30 min.

Storage needed for total product volumetry for the whole season of 70 000 km2 area is around 7TB. But there is no need to buy the whole Storage from starting point. Our billing method for Sen4CAP users is very flexible. Most of the clients start from 2 or more Terabytes. If, for example, 3TB is enough for 2 or 3 months of usage, the client will pay only for that specific amount of Storage. After that, if the demand for Storage is higher, we can propose pay-per-use billing for each new 1GB.

Costs of usage in a 12-month contract
12 months of 16vCPU/128GB RAM/384GB SSD of root disk and 3TB for Start.

If you are interested in the service described above, please contact us for individual consultation and selection of an appropriate solution.