We, the Earth Observation of Agroecosystems (EOA) team at Agroscope, contribute to improving the sustainability of our land management practices by providing necessary information for targeted decision making.
We use Earth Observation (EO) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and develop empirical and mechanistic models to interpreted EO data from multiple sources across several scales in order to understand the ecophysiological processes happening in our agroecosystems.
Our vision is to get a holistic understanding of our agroecosystems in order to improve the sustainability of our land management practices – may this be through optimized resource utilization, more targeted management measures or by identifying crop varieties and plant species adapted to local conditions.
In our activities we aim to generate accessible, reproducible, long-term oriented research that benefits society and the environment of current and upcoming generations.
We are a dedicated team of researchers united by common vision. We collaborate with national and international partners to solve the challenges of our time. The EOA-Team is situated within the Water Protection and Substance Flows Group and the strategic research division Agroecology and Environment of Agroscope, the Swiss centre of excellence for agricultural research that is affiliated with the Federal Office for Agriculture.
We use Earth Observation (EO) technology from the local to the continental scale, with a focus on drones for ecophysiological experiments and satellites for continental scale monitoring. Within our Agroecosystem Earth Observation Platform (AEOP) we fuse remotely sensed with environmental (e.g. weather, topography, soil) and in-situ data. We interpret these data streams using mechanistically models that are based on ecophysiological process understanding, state-of-the-art machine learning and expert knowledge from the EO, ecological and agricultural domain. The AEOP is powered by our open source Earth Observation data abstraction library EOdal.
Among our local collaborators are the Crop Science Group at ETH Zürich, EcoVision Lab at ETH and University of Zürich, the Agricultural and Process Engineering Group at Bern University of Applied Sciences. Moreover, we work together with our international partners through the European COST action OPTIMISE and SENSECO. We are grateful to be able to work with you.
We have received funding from several agencies including the Swiss National Science Foundation, Federal Office for the Environment , Federal Office for Agriculture. Thanks to you we were able to bring together a dedicated team.
To our partners, funders and all the people that have supported us on the way:
Thanks a lot! 🙏
