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Evaluation and improvement of Copernicus HR-VPP product for crop phenology monitoring

Prikaziuk, Egor ; Silva, Cláudio F. ; Koren, Gerbrand ; Cai, Zhanzhang LU ; Berger, Katja ; Belda, Santiago ; Graf, Lukas Valentin ; Tomelleri, Enrico ; Verrelst, Jochem and Segarra, Joel , et al. (2025) In Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 233.
Abstract

Monitoring agricultural land with optical remote sensing offers a valuable tool for estimating crop yield and supporting decision-making for food security. Cropland phenology indicators, such as the start of season (SOS), the end of season (EOS), and the number of growing seasons per year, provide essential information for land managers. While established toolboxes like TIMESAT have been extracting phenological metrics from coarse remote sensing data for two decades, agricultural monitoring applications demand continuous time series of high-resolution data, made possible by the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-2 since 2015. Recently, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) released the pan-European High-Resolution Vegetation... (More)

Monitoring agricultural land with optical remote sensing offers a valuable tool for estimating crop yield and supporting decision-making for food security. Cropland phenology indicators, such as the start of season (SOS), the end of season (EOS), and the number of growing seasons per year, provide essential information for land managers. While established toolboxes like TIMESAT have been extracting phenological metrics from coarse remote sensing data for two decades, agricultural monitoring applications demand continuous time series of high-resolution data, made possible by the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-2 since 2015. Recently, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) released the pan-European High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP) product suite. We conducted the first comprehensive validation of the analysis-ready SOS and EOS metrics from the VPP dataset of the HR-VPP product over a large set of agricultural fields spanning 10 countries, 14 crop types and 164 growing seasons. Our results demonstrate that the VPP product of the HR-VPP dataset correlates well with the sowing (r2 = 0.75) and harvesting (r2 = 0.56) dates observed in situ. The biases differ between spring (SOS bias: 59 days, EOS bias: 3 days) and winter (SOS bias: 136 days, EOS bias: –44 days) crops, likely due to the suppression of the autumn vegetation signal in the plant phenology index (PPI) by a solar zenith angle-dependent gain factor. We show that other indicators from the HR-VPP Vegetation Indices (VIs) product and re-parameterization of TIMESAT or DATimeS toolboxes are more suitable for winter crop phenology monitoring. This study calls for researchers and practitioners to carefully evaluate the performance of analysis-ready products to ensure their suitability for specific applications, ultimately promoting informed decision-making in agricultural management and food security endeavours.

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organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
keywords
Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), Crop, High-resolution veGetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP), Phenology, Sentinel-2
in
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture
volume
233
article number
110136
publisher
Elsevier
external identifiers
  • scopus:85218934176
ISSN
0168-1699
DOI
10.1016/j.compag.2025.110136
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
06645684-c100-42ef-8cfb-b6aa572aab9b
date added to LUP
2025-06-09 08:46:14
date last changed
2025-06-09 09:00:23
@article{06645684-c100-42ef-8cfb-b6aa572aab9b,
  abstract     = {{<p>Monitoring agricultural land with optical remote sensing offers a valuable tool for estimating crop yield and supporting decision-making for food security. Cropland phenology indicators, such as the start of season (SOS), the end of season (EOS), and the number of growing seasons per year, provide essential information for land managers. While established toolboxes like TIMESAT have been extracting phenological metrics from coarse remote sensing data for two decades, agricultural monitoring applications demand continuous time series of high-resolution data, made possible by the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-2 since 2015. Recently, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) released the pan-European High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP) product suite. We conducted the first comprehensive validation of the analysis-ready SOS and EOS metrics from the VPP dataset of the HR-VPP product over a large set of agricultural fields spanning 10 countries, 14 crop types and 164 growing seasons. Our results demonstrate that the VPP product of the HR-VPP dataset correlates well with the sowing (r<sup>2</sup> = 0.75) and harvesting (r<sup>2</sup> = 0.56) dates observed in situ. The biases differ between spring (SOS bias: 59 days, EOS bias: 3 days) and winter (SOS bias: 136 days, EOS bias: –44 days) crops, likely due to the suppression of the autumn vegetation signal in the plant phenology index (PPI) by a solar zenith angle-dependent gain factor. We show that other indicators from the HR-VPP Vegetation Indices (VIs) product and re-parameterization of TIMESAT or DATimeS toolboxes are more suitable for winter crop phenology monitoring. This study calls for researchers and practitioners to carefully evaluate the performance of analysis-ready products to ensure their suitability for specific applications, ultimately promoting informed decision-making in agricultural management and food security endeavours.</p>}},
  author       = {{Prikaziuk, Egor and Silva, Cláudio F. and Koren, Gerbrand and Cai, Zhanzhang and Berger, Katja and Belda, Santiago and Graf, Lukas Valentin and Tomelleri, Enrico and Verrelst, Jochem and Segarra, Joel and Ganeva, Dessislava}},
  issn         = {{0168-1699}},
  keywords     = {{Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS); Crop; High-resolution veGetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP); Phenology; Sentinel-2}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  publisher    = {{Elsevier}},
  series       = {{Computers and Electronics in Agriculture}},
  title        = {{Evaluation and improvement of Copernicus HR-VPP product for crop phenology monitoring}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2025.110136}},
  doi          = {{10.1016/j.compag.2025.110136}},
  volume       = {{233}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}