Conceptual Architecture and Service-Oriented Implementation of a Regional Geoportal for Rice Monitoring

Agricultural monitoring has greatly benefited from the increased availability of a wide variety of remote-sensed satellite imagery, ground-sensed data (e.g., weather station networks) and crop models, delivering a wealth of actionable information to stakeholders to better streamline and improve agricultural practices. Nevertheless, as the degree of sophistication of agriculture monitoring systems increases, significant challenges arise due to the handling and integration of multi-scale data sources to present information to decision-makers in a way which is useful, understandable and user friendly. To address these issues, in this article we present the conceptual architecture and service-oriented implementation of a regional geoportal, specifically focused on rice crop monitoring in order to perform unified monitoring with a supporting system at regional scale. It is capable of storing, processing, managing, serving and visualizing monitoring and generated data products with different granularity and originating from different data sources. Specifically, we focus on data sources and data flow, and their importance for and in relation to different stakeholders. In the context of an EU-funded research project, we present an implementation of the regional geoportal for rice monitoring, which is currently in use in Europe's three largest rice-producing countries, Italy, Greece and Spain.