Francis Matthews

Combining Sentinel-2 Earth Observation data with integrated administration and control system (IACS) field parcel boundary data from EU member states allows new object-orientated approaches to associate field parcels with their dynamical properties (e.g. cropping and management practices, rainfall and soil moisture regime). This approach can better spatially target soil health related issues specific to field-parcels in agricultural landscapes in Europe, while incorporating the temporal dynamics of cropping systems when considering risks to soil with a time-dependent component. Soil erosion, a principle threat facing European soils, is typically time-concentrated into periods of low or absent crop canopy cover corresponding with erosive rainstorms. Given that these periods of risk vary with the climatic regime and cropping system employed, scalable methods built on large geospatial datasets can reveal key information on the soil erosion risk associated with field parcels across the European continent. Here, we present a user case combining gap-filled crop canopy cover dynamics from Sentinel-2 with quantifications of rainfall erosive potential (rainfall erosivity) from the REDES database to identify the time periods of elevated erosion risk associated with cultivated crops. We utilise a harmonised form of the available IACS data repository from 10 IACS data regions/member states as a spatial backbone to associate risk indices