In recent years extreme events such as droughts, hurricanes, and floods have impacted humanity around the globe. Although such events occur naturally, they have increased in frequency due to climate change. The new Helmholtz Climate Initiative (HI-CAM), launched in July 2019, is a two-year project which seeks the effective communication of strategies to face climate change and its impact on several fields of the human development.
Within the framework of the HICAM Project “Agricultural and Aquatic Systems”, the Team Agroecosystems and Phenology of the Earth Observation Center at DLR will collaborate with the Department of Soil System Science and the Department of River Ecology of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, on the topics of climate change, and its impact on agricultural and aquatic ecosystems.
Using novel data science techniques, high-quality in situ data, and dense time series of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, a robust and transferable classification scheme for crop types in Germany for the year 2018 will be established. Furthermore, the analysis of pheonological metrics and statistics, including anomaly detection in plant productivity, will be provided. These results will set the basis for a better modelling of adapted agricultural practices that should be implemented to cope with climate change in years to come.
