Relevance

In HR-VPP phenology is defined as the timing of the development of photosynthetically active leaf foliage (Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, 2022). Phenology is a key indicator of flora and fauna's growth and reproduction, and of how ecosystems respond to climatic factors and human-induced disturbances.

As phenology information allows monitoring of the spatial pattern, status and inter-annual variability of ecosystems, it has also strong potential in monitoring their condition and degradation.

New high-resolutions products

The new product suite offers three types of products:

• Four different daily raw Vegetation Indices (VI): record the status of the vegetation for every 10m pixel within 12 hours after observation. For expert users.

• Seasonal Trajectories (ST), show the status of the vegetation at a regular time-interval of 10 days, with filled gaps in the observations due to clouds or other disturbances.

• Vegetation Phenological and Productivity parameters (VPP) provide yearly metrics for up to two growing seasons (e.g. start or end of the growing season, season length, seasonal productivity, etc.)

The products cover the entire EEA39 region (33 member countries and 6 cooperating countries) from 1st January 2017, with a spatial resolution of 10 m, derived from the Sentinel-2 satellite constellation. New tools will be released soon to support the use of the big dataset.

Applications

Plant phenology is an indicator for several events characterising the natural seasonal cycle such as birds nesting, insect emergence, migration patterns, food webs and global cycles of water and carbon, among others. For this reason, it is also used to forecast pollens spreads and allergy risks and by utilised by farmers and gardeners to plan fertilization, pesticide and plant to avoid frosts.

HR-VPP products will increase the potential of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service to serve policy requirements such as the Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), Climate initiatives such as the LULUCF regulation for 2021-2030, the Urban Agenda, the Circular Economy policies of the EU as well as the UN Sustainable Development Goals.