OBSERVER: Introducing Copernicus Land’s new Croplands product suite
evan
Thu, 19/06/2025 – 14:15
Agricultural land covers roughly a third of Europe, and as demand grows for detailed information on how that land is used, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service has introduced HRL Croplands. This new addition to the High Resolution Layers product portfolio provides consistent, high-resolution data on crop types, farming practices, and land use patterns, updated annually and available across Europe. In this Observer, we walk through the new product and present an overview of the different layers available to users.
As it stands today, nearly 50% of the land in Europe is dedicated to agriculture. This makes it among the most heavily farmed land masses on the planet.
There are several historical and geographical reasons for this. Agriculture first made its way from the Middle East to the European continent through the Mediterranean roughly 8-9,000 years ago. Several thousand years after that, the practice spread across much of central Europe before making a final push into northern Europe and Scandinavia by about 4,000 BCE. This means that the continent has been actively farmed for more than six thousand years.
Europe is also well suited geographically. Much of central and western Europe boasts temperate climates, fertile soils and abundant rainfall, making it naturally suitable for farming. In fact, several central and eastern European countries like Czechia, Hungary and Romania are covered by large swathes of chernozem, or “black earth” which is a type of soil regarded by many as among of the most fertile on the planet.
However, there is a cost to all this agricultural development. For example, studies suggest that just before agriculture spread to Europe, the continent was 70% forested. Clearing these forests for crops and pastures was the largest driver of deforestation, and by the medieval era forest cover had dropped to around 35%. Though there has been a slight rebound since then, forest cover in modern Europe sits at just 39%. Agricultural development has also strained biodiversity, soil quality, and water systems after centuries of intensive cultivation, fertiliser use, and land modification. New pressures are also constantly popping up—from climate change to shifting consumer demands.
Product suite driven by user requirements
The need for detailed, up-to-date agricultural monitoring has never been more critical. A series of stakeholder consultations conducted as part of the Horizon 2020 ECoLaSS project revealed a consistent set of user priorities when it comes to agricultural monitoring: high thematic accuracy, transparent methods, regular updates, and full alignment with EU policy goals. In response, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service developed and released a new product suite designed specifically to meet these user requirements. The High Resolution Layer (HRL) Croplands is designed for researchers, policymakers, farmers and other stakeholders interested in analysing the European agricultural landscape. All Croplands products are available across the entire EEA38 + UK with a spatial resolution of 10m.
The HRL Croplands suite was also designed to adhere to guidelines put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Under these guidelines, countries are required to report greenhouse gas emissions and removals from land use categories, including cropland and grassland, as part of their national inventories. The HRL Croplands product suite is therefore a reflection of user demands and international reporting needs
The product suite is divided into two main groupings: Crop Types and Cropping Patterns. The Crop Types group includes a single product, also called Crop Types, which classifies cropland into 19 distinct crop categories such as wheat, barley, and maize.
The Cropping Patterns group, in contrast, contains 12 distinct products designed to capture key agricultural practices over time
Main Crop
Main Crop Harvest provides the harvest date of the main growing season while Main Crop Emergence provides information on when seedlings break through the surface and become visibly established in the soil. Main Crop Duration captures the total duration of the main growing season, information which is especially important for assessing crop health, estimating yields, and understanding regional differences in agricultural intensity.
Secondary Crop
Much like the Main Crop products, Secondary Crop products provide geospatial layers on emergence and duration, but instead of a harvest product, users have access to a Secondary Crops Type product which classifies the secondary growing season into four broad crop categories. This is because secondary crops are typically not grown with harvest in mind but rather as cover crops, grown to improve soil health, reduce erosion, and improve nutrient cycling.
Bare Soil
The Bare Soil Before product provides information on the duration of the bare soil period before the start of the main growing season, while the Bare Soil After product captures the period after. This information is useful for understanding soil exposure risks, identifying periods of vulnerability to erosion or nutrient loss, and supporting sustainable land management practices such as cover cropping or conservation tillage.
Fallow Land
The Fallow Land Presence product identifies the presence of land which is intentionally left unplanted for a period of time while the Fallow Land Duration product quantifies the length of that period. This information can be used to assess land use intensity, support soil conservation strategies, monitor compliance with agricultural policies, and gain insights into sustainable farming practices across different regions.
Cropping Seasons
Cropping Seasons Yearly identifies the number of growing seasons in a given area within a calendar year, while Cropping Seasons Types over 3 years provides information on the annual crop type diversity over a three-year period. These products are designed to support analyses of cropping intensity, crop rotation practices, and long-term agricultural sustainability.
Policy support
User requirements have played a central role in the development of the Croplands product suite. One of the biggest user demands was for products which can support the development and implementation of EU policies, and many of the Croplands products have been designed with that purpose in mind.
The Common Agricultural Policy aims to ensure sustainable food production, support farmers’ livelihoods, and promote environmental stewardship across Europe. As a result, it calls for the monitoring of key agricultural indicators such as crop diversification, fallow land, and land use intensity, all of which are covered by different HRL Croplands products. The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy and Soil Strategy are also both designed to support the transition to sustainable agriculture and stand to benefit from new products dedicated to monitoring bare soil, fallow land, and cropping patterns.
But it’s not just agriculture-related policy that HRL Cropland does not just support agriculture-related policy, however. The design and monitoring of policies centred around biodiversity and habitat restoration also stand to benefit from HRL Croplands products as well. The new Nature Restoration Regulation aims to restore Europe’s degraded ecosystems, which will inevitably mean conversion of certain agricultural land back into more natural habitats. Products like Cropping Patterns and Crop Types can help identify areas suitable for ecological restoration.
The Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, the Habitats Directive, and the Birds Directive all aim to protect and reverse biodiversity loss in Europe. Low-intensity and structurally diverse farmland, such as agroforestry systems or mixed-crop landscapes, actually plays a key role in this effort, as it serves as important breeding and foraging habitat for many species and supports a variety of semi-natural ecosystems. These landscapes can also enhance habitat connectivity by creating corridors between more natural areas, allowing species to avoid dangerous and unliveable open field conditions. Therefore, monitoring cropping patterns, fallow land, and land use intensity can help identify pressures on biodiversity and track the effectiveness of these EU policies.
Scientific Applications
Beyond policy applications, the new Croplands product suite also provides valuable opportunities for scientific research. With its pan-European scope, high spatial resolution, annual updates, and a time series extending back to 2017, the possibilities are limited mainly by the creativity of the researchers themselves.
Land cover monitoring is one of the most obvious applications of these new datasets. Investigators interested in analysing the way agricultural areas have evolved over time—at either the national or international scale—now have a handful of reliable, openly accessible products with which to do so. This can enable the identification and monitoring of regional trends, such as the expansion of specific crops or shifts in farming intensity.
Another major scientific application is in the context of biomass monitoring, where HRL Croplands products can support better estimates of autotrophic respiration—the portion of carbon previously absorbed through photosynthesis which is released back into the atmosphere as part of the metabolic process by which plants generate the energy needed to fuel their growth and biological functions. This information is important because without accounting for autotrophic respiration, we risk overestimating how effective crops and other vegetation are at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a key factor in climate modelling, carbon budgeting and sustainability planning. Because layers like Crop Types are designed to directly identify specific crops, they are indirectly able to provide reliable estimates of the biomass of “C3” versus “C4” crops, classifications that refer to the specific photosynthetic mechanisms different groups of plants use, which in turn influences their water use efficiency, carbon uptake, and rates of autotrophic respiration.
Ecologists also stand to benefit from Croplands datasets. Detailed information on field boundaries can support studies on habitat fragmentation, one of the major drivers of population decline for many species. When combined with other CLMS datasets like Small Woody Features, which is explicitly designed to map narrow hedgerows, tree lines and small wooded patches between 200 and 5,000 square metres, this information on semi-natural agricultural habitats can help researchers analyse landscape connectivity in agricultural areas across Europe.
Croplands products can also support research into the ecology of farmland birds, many of which have experienced long-term declines due to shifts in cropping patterns and the intensification of agricultural practices. Access to spatially detailed crop type data, fallow land extent, and timing of field use allows researchers to examine how different management strategies influence key metrics associated with the success of farmland birds.
Taken together, the HRL Croplands products represent a major step forward for publicly funded, Earth Observation-based agricultural monitoring in Europe. By providing high temporal resolution data products with annual update cycles, the suite empowers a broad userbase with the tools they need to make timely, data-driven decisions. The HRL Croplands suite stands ready to support policymakers, land managers, and researchers with the information they need to help build a more sustainable agricultural future for Europe.
Thu, 19/06/2025 – 12:00