Download or read book Deliverable 3, Prototype and Technical Guidance for EO-based Monitoring of Peatland/wetland written by and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SEPLA stands for "Satellite based mapping and monitoring of European peatland and wetland for LULUCF and agriculture". The main objective of the project is to ensure there are methods available for a comprehensive inventory of wetlands and peatlands and for the monitoring of their preservation and restoration by remote sensing and by regularly updated geo-datasets. This report, formally the third and the last deliverable of the project, elaborates on a prototype and technical guidance for Earth observation-based monitoring of peatlands or wetlands. Methodologies for the semantic description of the land cover, land use and soil related aspects are proposed as a pre-condition for this framework for peatland monitoring. Adapting feature-level Checks by Monitoring concepts to deal with ecosystems and with natural processes, the document elaborates examples of monitoring scenarios and tests several Sentinel-derived signals and markers. The peatland monitoring complexity is addressed by its decomposition into smaller and more manageable components. This involves a controlled breakdown of the requirements, feasibility and timing, the elimination of unnecessary processing and the prioritization of queries towards specified expectations. The three key elements of the monitoring system are discussed: the observation method, the temporal phenomenon that reveals an attribute or characteristic and the spatial feature of interest that exhibits the observed phenomenon. Additional EO-based methods that rely on both passive and active satellite sensors are investigated. A proxy method based on multiannual farmers' declarations for handling non-monitorable land aspects is described. The report also documents a summary of study cases that explore the possibilities of discrimination between the managed grassland on organic and on mineral soils, the in-depth characterisation of areas on organic soils and a machine learning based peatland mapping approach. All analyses were performed using data provided by the participating Member States: Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland and Latvia combined with publicly accessible data and products provided by Copernicus Sentinel data access and distribution services and the Copernicus Land Monitoring Services. Despite their promising outcomes, these study cases revealed that ground data collection will be essential for learning, optimisation and validation of the EO-based monitoring methods. Tailored regional-based approaches, relying on local contextual information and using EO-based solutions or Copernicus downstream services can be expected to contribute to a workable solution. The report concludes that the satellite-based monitoring of peatland and wetland is a very complex, yet feasible task, but it requires multidisciplinary expert knowledge and diverse types of data. It also requires the integration of satellite data with ground data, with hydrological models or with ecosystem models. The establishment of a community of practice will likely be essential for an effective uptake of novel technology and for transfer of know-how.