EO4Agri 2027

The workshop will be structured around the following thematic areas:

 Theme 1: Policy, Food Security, and Global Monitoring. This theme addresses the policy frameworks that create demand for EO, and the global monitoring systems that inform food security decisions.

• The post-2027 CAP and the evolution of area monitoring, including the CAP Area Monitoring System and the proposed European Land Monitoring System (ELMS), with attention to phased implementation and farmer engagement;

• Other agriculture-related EU regulatory frameworks: the Deforestation Regulation, the Nature Restoration Regulation, the Soil Monitoring Law, and agricultural ecosystem indicators;

• Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 2, including national agricultural statistics, Eurostat, and support to national statistical offices;

• Early warning for food crises, humanitarian response, and anticipatory action at scale, and protection of vulnerable populations;

• The role of EO in supporting evidence-based decisions for food security from national to global scales.

Theme 2: Methods, Data Processing, and Infrastructure. This theme covers the scientific and technical foundations of EO for agriculture: algorithms, data processing, infrastructure, and validation.

• Artificial intelligence, foundation models, and self-supervised learning for agricultural EO, including multi-source, multi-temporal pre-training and the use of embeddings for crop type classification, yield prediction, and similarity search;

• Crop type mapping, crop condition monitoring, and yield estimation from field to global scales;

• Data assimilation and the coupling of EO with crop and land surface models;
• Digital twins, physics-informed approaches, Destination Earth, and European data spaces for agriculture;

• In situ networks, ground truth, and farmer-contributed data;

• Validation, benchmarking, uncertainty quantification and reproducibility 

Theme 3: Crop Stressors, Climate Adaptation, and Resilience. This theme focuses on the application of EO to monitor and respond to the stresses that threaten agricultural production.

• Monitoring stressors and changing growing conditions, and attributing stress to biotic or abiotic causes;

• Drought, heat, and water stress; irrigation mapping, scheduling, and water productivity;

• Extreme event early warning, monitoring, and damage characterisation;

• Risk management and risk transfer: index and parametric insurance; 

• Shifting crop suitability and the adaptation of cropping systems;

• Soil health monitoring and management.

Theme 4: Applications and Services. This theme addresses the translation of EO capability into applications and services for agriculture.

• Agricultural practices: tillage, cover crops, residue management, and landscape features;

• Smallholder systems and the resolution frontier;

• Pasture, rangeland, and livestock systems;

• Deforestation-free commodities and supply-chain traceability;

• UAV–satellite synergies for crop monitoring: multi-source and multimodal observations, modular and adaptive synergies, and integration of emerging technologies such as UAV swarms and autonomous deployment;

• User engagement and co-design of EO services.

Theme 5: Operational Uptake. This theme addresses the challenges of sustaining EO-based services beyond project lifetimes, and ensuring they are taken up operationally.

• From project to service: operational sustainability, funding models, institutional ownership, and public–private partnerships;

• The economics of EO: cost-benefit analysis, business models for operational services, and the value of free and open data for public good applications;

• Capacity building and technology transfer, continuity of EO data, and the harmonisation and standardisation of statistics and EO data;

• Open data, open science, and FAIR data handling.

Theme 6: Cross-Cutting and Emerging Topics. This theme captures topics that span multiple themes or represent emerging areas not covered elsewhere.

• Integration across scales: from global to local;

• New and upcoming EO missions and their potential for agriculture;

• Emerging technologies and methodologies.