Harnessing Administrative Data Inventories to Create a Reliable Transnational Reference Database for Crop Type Monitoring

With leaps in machine learning techniques and their application on Earth observation challenges has unlocked unprecedented performance across the domain. While the further development of these methods was previously limited by the avail-ability and volume of sensor data and computing resources, the lack of adequate reference data is now constituting new bottlenecks. Since creating such ground-truth information is an expensive and error-prone task, new ways must be devised to source reliable, high-quality reference data on large scales. As an example, we showcase Eurocrops, a reference dataset for crop type classification that aggregates and harmonizes administrative data surveyed in different countries with the goal of transnational interoperability.