The final product will be a set of algorithms that can be used to derive information on crop calendars, i.e. specific field interventions such as harvest, planting or ploughing. The final set of methodologies that will be offered will depend on available data and user interactions 

A first method (harvest) will be ready at the end of 2020. User feedback will be used to further fine-tune the product in 2021, and in parallel the number of products in this pilot will be expanded.

Beta versions will only be available within e-shape, and for the users of the pilot. After thorough evaluation of the performance, it will be made publicly available.

The final outcome is an offering of the crop calendar products as a service. 

The final deployment of the methods is part of the development exercise, where the beta version will be deployed on a number of platforms. A comparison will be made regarding the availability of the needed input data, the speed and cost of processing, and the ease of access for external users. 

Based on these outcomes, and in discussion with the (potential) users, a more operational setting will be foreseen, where users can easily extract the outcomes for their specific fields/regions of interest.  

In a first instance, the beta-version will be available on github, for external evaluation. This format is however not suitable for the final end users, so a more easily accessible format is envisaged. This is however part of the co-design approach

The purpose of the Group on Earth Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM) is to increase market transparency and improve food security by producing and disseminating relevant, timely, and actionable information on agricultural conditions. Within GEOGLAM different working groups are active, of which the Essential Agricultural Variables (EAV) is one.  They identified crop calendars as an important missing component is agricultural monitoring. However, this pilot is not just about a methodological development to meet this need, but is also focused on different aspects of their operations. For example, the question on how and where this service should be provided, with relation to the growing and complex European EO IT infrastructure, is also of high interest. While dedicated tests will be executed within this pilot, they will serve as input in a wider exercise which occurs at the whole e-shape level in Work Package 3.

With the development of Crop Calendars As a service, these variables can now be incorporated in the different agricultural monitoring services of GEOGLAM, providing an additional data layer that will enable a more thorough and detailed monitoring of the agricultural production at a global level.

In addition, while crop calendars have been identified as EAV's for GEOGLAM, they also serve a much wider community. In e-shape alone, for example, the crop calendars are also of high interest for the other three pilots in Showcase 1, which combined cover quite a substantial portion of the agricultural monitoring landscape.   This linkage between the pilots will also enable a more thorough evaluation of the methodology, as well as a quick uptake by different type of users in the agricultural EO community.

Within this pilot, and the showcase at large, there is special attention to the organization of the in-situ data which is needed for calibration/validation purposes. This is an often recurrent problem, and within this pilot the Agrostac platform is used and further developed. Agrostac is a data sharing platform, specifically focussing on agricultural field data. All data which is being used within the pilots, and which are free to share, will be made available through this platform.

The code itself will be published on Github, to enable a more thorough evaluation of the beta version of the code by a multitude of users. 

As the outcome of the pilot will be an on-demand service, a direct registering in the GEOSS catalogue is not foreseen. However, we do plan to register our pilot application in service catalogues, such as the NextGEOSS service catalogue, once it's fully developed.