Bionote
Jakob Wachter is a project scientist at VISTA Geo GmbH. After a B.Sc. in geography, he deepened his experience in remote sensing by completing a M.Sc. in Applied Earth Observation. His specialties are optical and SAR remote sensing, carbon farming applications and hydrological applications. During internships and within the scope of bachelor’s and master’s theses, he developed a focus on the implementation of semi-automatic processing chains for remotely sensed data, especially for the detection of hydrological processes. His core focus areas at VISTA are the development, implementation and testing of EO-data processing and analysis chains as well as the active management of research projects.
Presentation Abstract
Agriculture can make a significant contribution to the reduction of atmospheric CO2 through adapted cultivation methods and actively binding CO2 through the targeted build-up of humus in the soil. In addition, more resilient farming methods such as crop rotation and the planting of catch crops contribute significantly to more sustainable food production.
To exploit this potential of carbon farming, a solution for monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of these measures is required. Valuable information on vegetation and soil can be derived from high-resolution, globally available Earth Observation data from the Copernicus program. These data are therefore ideally suited to enable this solution, both for past and future periods.
Within the ESA Business Application project “EO4CarbonFarming” (EO4CF), such an MRV tool has been developed based on Copernicus data. It can monitor the growth of catch crops and verify farming measures taken to assure CO2 uptake and humus build-up in the soil. To facilitate this, high-resolution optical and radar data (Sentinel-2) are used in combination with high-quality pre-processing methods, a radiative transfer model and newly developed algorithms specifically for the derivation of humus in the soil.
The sound determination of carbon stocks in fields is an essential component of assessing the effectiveness of carbon farming for the climate and to develop business models on this basis.
After the successful development and testing of the EO4CF services, the project is now concluded with service results being generated and delivered to users via the EO4CF Cockpit, a Graphical User Interface developed in the scope of the project.
Co-Authors: Isabella Kausch, Silke Migdall, Heike Bach
This project was funded within ESA Contract Number 4000140151/22/NL/FGL/mma