New paper on European soil organic carbon monitoring system

A paper titled “A European soil organic carbon monitoring system leveraging Sentinel 2 imagery and the LUCAS soil database” was recently published in Geoderma.

Access the paper here 

This paper is the direct scientific outcome of the European Space Agency (ESA) funded WorldSoils project. This project was a great collaboration between scientists and institutions that led to this scientific outcome.

The paper describes a pre-operational Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) monitoring system in a cloud environment. The system predicts topsoil organic carbon content at regional and continental scales from Earth Observation (EO) satellite data with a continuous cover over Europe. The system utilizes spectral models for croplands and a digital soil mapping approach for permanently vegetated areas such as grasslands and forests. Models strongly rely on soil reflectance composites from the Sentinel 2 multispectral instrument, providing the median reflectance for all valid pixels over a period of three years. Key highlights:

• Topsoil SOC maps across Europe, integrating seamlessly spectral models for croplands and digital soil mapping for vegetated areas.
• SOC prediction algorithms achieving reasonable accuracy for continental models. Insights into regional variations within Europe  
• The resulting data of SOC content and uncertainty intervals can be accessed from a friendly user interface.

About WorldSoils

WORLDSOILS is part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Earth Observation Strategy 2040 and is ESA's Earth Observation Envelope Programme backbone. The project’s methods are based on Earth Observation (EO) technology with the main objective of developing a pre-operational global Earth Observation-Soil Monitoring System based on monitoring top soil organic carbon (SOC).

The consortium is led by GMV (Madrid, Spain) and includes: ISRIC - World Soil Information, DLR (German Aerospace Center), GFZ (German Research Center for Geosciences), UCL (Catholic University of Louvain), CZU (Czech University of Life Sciences), AUTh (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) as partners and Tel Aviv University (TAU) as external support contractor.