Objectives of the service
PerPlant CCGrade delivers automated, all-weather monitoring of catch-crop compliance across Denmark. By fusing tractor-mounted RGB and multispectral sensor data (from PerPlant’s existing Agronomy-on-the-Edge sensor network of 40+ units, ~160,000 ha) with Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery, the platform produces a single annual 1–5 grade per parcel, anchored in SGAV’s official trappemodel (graded assessment) rubric. Its primary objective is to help SGAV (Danish Agency for Green Transition and Aquatic Environment) identify, before each field visit, which parcels merit a manual catch-crop inspection, and thereby increase compliance-monitoring coverage from today’s <10% towards >80% of the country’s ~365,000 hectares of catch-crop area.
Users and their needs
The primary user community is SGAV — the Danish Agency for Green Transition and Aquatic Environment (Styrelsen for Grøn Arealomlægning og Vandmiljø), under the Ministry for the Green Tripartite. SGAV oversees ~33,000 farmers subject to catch-crop rules but is limited by manual inspection capacity to ~686 on-the-spot controls per year (each with a budget of ~12 hours). Parcels for inspection are today selected through a combination of risk-based and random sampling; inspection findings feed SGAV’s control system, where consequences are calculated and the farmer is heard before a decision is issued. SGAV’s needs are: (a) full-country visibility of catch-crop status, (b) reliable prioritisation of the limited inspector time available, (c) outputs that fit the existing control-system workflow (shapefiles opened in QGIS), and (d) evidence-grade outputs suitable for consolidation into SGAV’s annual reporting to the European Commission — where non-compliance above the permitted threshold raises the mandatory inspection rate from 5% to 7.5%. Secondary users include Danish farmers (who need predictable compliance to avoid conditionality penalties) and other EU regulators facing analogous CAP eco-scheme obligations.
Service/ system concept
CCGrade is a three-layer service. Layer A ingests ground observations (from PerPlant AOE tractor sensors) and Copernicus Sentinel-1/2 imagery. Layer B fuses the two data streams per parcel, computes vegetation indices (NDVI, NDRE) and SAR features, classifies each parcel into three statuses (Catch crop / No catch crop / Insufficient), sub-classifies the Insufficient class using SGAV’s obs_ID coverage thresholds, and applies the graded assessment model to produce a 1–5 grade per parcel. Layer C delivers OGC-compliant shapefiles with the per-parcel grades to SGAV weekly via an SFTP-compatible interface, ready for direct use in QGIS. All processing is performed in an EU sovereign cloud with a ≥5-year audit log, under a GDPR-compliant data flow.
Space Added Value
Copernicus Sentinel-1 (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Sentinel-2 (multispectral, bands B2–B8A, B11–B12) are non-substitutable. (1) National scale: covering ~365,000 ha with drones or manual surveys is infeasible at project budget; Sentinel provides free, continuous, nationwide coverage. (2) All-weather: Nordic September–October cloud cover regularly invalidates optical-only monitoring — Sentinel-1 SAR is weather-independent and enables the ≥95% weekly coverage target. (3) Multi-year archive: Sentinel-2’s historical record enables year-on-year retraining and benchmarking, critical for the project’s ≥90% accuracy KPI and the post-project commercial sustainability case.
Current Status
The project kicked off on 26 May 2026 with ESA and SGAV, and the team is now in the baseline design phase. SGAV’s inspection workflow has been captured and is being refined through AS-IS/TO-BE user-journey mapping and stakeholder interviews (budget owner, IT system owner, inspectors, compliance team and farmers). Historical control data (8,142 labelled parcels across ~54,000 ha) informs the baseline design, and SGAV’s 2024/2025 inspection records have been requested through the established data-exchange channel; the grading model rubric has been mapped into the design. Consolidation of the system architecture is in progress and the combined BDR/CDR document set is in preparation. Field data collection follows the 2026 catch-crop season, with pilot execution across the AOE network aligned to the September 2026 inspection window. The Final Review and pilot outcomes are due in May 2027. The project team holds bi-weekly working sessions with SGAV and reports progress to ESA through Monthly Progress Reports.
Prime Contractor(s)
