European Union crop map 2022: Earth observation’s 10-meter dive into Europe’s crop tapestry
Babak Ghassemi, Emma Izquierdo‐Verdiguier, Astrid Verhegghen, Momchil Yordanov, Guido Lemoine, Álvaro Moreno‐Martínez, Davide De Marchi, Marijn van der Velde, Francesco Vuolo, Raphaël d’Andrimont
Abstract
To provide the information needed for a detailed monitoring of crop types across the European Union (EU), we present an advanced 10-metre resolution map for the EU and Ukraine with 19 crop types for 2022, updating the 2018 version. Using Earth Observation (EO) and in-situ data from Eurostat's Land Use and Coverage Area Frame Survey (LUCAS) 2022, the methodology included 134,684 LUCAS Copernicus polygons, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, land surface temperature and a digital elevation model. Based on this data, two classification layers were developed using a Random Forest machine learning approach: a primary map and a gap-filling map to address cloud-covered gaps. The combined maps, covering 27 EU countries, show an overall accuracy of 79.3% for seven major land cover classes and 70.6% for all 19 crop types. The trained model was used to derive the 2022 map for Ukraine, demonstrating its robustness even in regions without labelled samples for model training.