User requirements for a Copernicus Land Monitoring Service including soils

Kurzfassung

The CUP4SOIL project aims to develop and test a proof-of-concept for a future downstream service to support national and European agencies in reporting on soil health/quality. One of the main tasks is to collect the specific user requirements for future soil products within the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. The collection of the user requirements for a future Copernicus soil parameter service consists of several phases. One of the main drivers for the design of this process is the variety of current user requirement studies in Europe that tend to fatigue the user’s responses. Therefore, several preparation steps are considered before approaching users to ask precise questions regarding user needs. The process is inspired by the user requirement-gathering process of the ESA WorldSoils project. The current policy framework, existing projects and initiatives are scanned in the first phase of the project to suggest a short list of soil health indicators that are possible to retrieve using Copernicus EO data. From this shortlist, specific user questions are developed. In the second phase, users are approached by a survey and webinar to prioritise and specify the user needs for the shortlist, and to check for additional user needs and specifications. In total, nearly 150 potential users were reached so far. In this contribution, the results will be presented detailing which soil properties, resolution, accuracy, format and application domains are most important for the potential users. This can guide the second iteration of EO based soil properties generated in the CUP4SOIL project. This process will be repeated after the ESA Symposium, where our first EO-based soil information products and first ideas for user showcases will be presented. At the symposium, users will get an update on the possibilities and difficulties of EO-based soil information products, which may affect their use cases. At the end of the project, CUP4SOIL suggests a list of soil information products and their specifications for a future high-resolution Copernicus service on soils.