DIONE Green Accountability toolbox that comprises a farmers’ compliance monitoring tool, and an AI-enabled DIONE environmental performance tool.

The tool for automated checking of farmers’ compliance to the green direct payment scheme rules will consist of several components: data collection and management component, rule-based engine component, reporting component, web interface component.

DIONE will provide a methodological framework with data-driven metrics to constructively respond to the criticism on CAP providing a dynamic Environmental Performance tool for public, policymakers and environmental actors to gain frequently updated insights and actionable information about the environmental performance of the current direct payments scheme.

DIONE EO component to extract Sentinel Hub information/images based on DIAS and produce enhanced crop-type maps and non-productive EFAs maps. One of the major upgrades of Sentinel Hub, planned within DIONE, is support for data fusion, allowing using data from different data sources within the same processing cycle. Data fusion will open a completely new world, as it will make it possible to engage in complex data processing, which was until now possible only in Google Earth Engine, in an accessible fashion. Possibilities of use are endless – from better quality assessment of Sentinel-5P data (combining cloud and aerosol data sources), improved water detection (Sentinel-2 NDWI and Sentinel-1 response), daily interpolation of NDVI value for agriculture monitoring using Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, and Landsat-8 data, wildfires (Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-5P), etc.

To complement Sentinel 2 optical-based resolution in problematic cases, such as over regions of small land parcel sizes (predominantly observed in South Europe) or where significant cloud masking is observed (an important issue in Northern/Central Europe), DIONE shall exploit the use of drone-based LC/LU image capture next to the remote sensing technology. Drones have the advantage of being flexible in data acquisition and, since they fly at limited altitudes and also flight times can be adjusted to the local weather conditions, cloud masking is not an issue.

A framework will be deployed that will allow the capture of geo-tagged photos from the farmers with a high degree of quality and trust. For ensuring maximum positional and time accuracy, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and multiple location sources, such as GNSS, Cell-ID, Wi-Fi or the more recent EGNOS services. Techniques such as lighting direction and distribution detectors as well as keypoint-based detectors for Copy-Move Forgery Detection (CMFD) will be combined aiming to protect the system from a wide range of possible images manipulations. For ensuring optimal resilience and operation at all conditions and recognising the need for the framework to offer highly trusted data when used in remote areas with no or limited connectivity capabilities, all the functionalities are designed to be available for devices not connected to a network. This way the data quality and integrity are ensured under any usage scenario and location challenges.

Nowadays information w.r.t. to erosion, loss of organic matter and biomass, salinization, etc. are neglected. DIONE moves to address this gap by providing the paying agencies with low-cost, handheld, and easy to use smart sensors for recording the soil’s health; thus, enabling the rapid acquisition of accurate in-situ measurements of the quality-related soil parameters (eg. soil organic carbon, pH, soil texture parameters) across the pilot areas as the paying agencies will use them in the field during their visits. These data are then transmitted securely into a single focal point (central database) which further processes them to develop spatially explicit maps of key indicators for land degradation.