The innovative IMAGINES project has developed activities to support the operations of the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS), and prepared the use of the Sentinels missions’ data in an operational context.

The main objectives of IMAGINES were to:

(i) improve the retrieval of basic biophysical variables (Terrestrial Essential Climate Variables), mainly Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) and surface albedo, by merging the information coming from different sensors (PROBA-V and Landsat-8) in view to prepare the use of Sentinel missions’ data;

(ii) develop qualified software able to process multi-sensor data at the global scale on a fully automatic basis;

(iii) complement and contribute to existing or future agricultural services by providing new data streams relying upon an original method to assess the above-ground biomass, based on the assimilation of satellite products in a Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) in order to monitor the crop/fodder biomass production together with the carbon and water fluxes;

(iv) demonstrate the added value of this contribution for a community of users acting at global, European, national, and regional scales.

Moreover, IMAGINES has favoured the emergence of new downstream activities dedicated to the monitoring of crop and fodder production that are key for the implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, the food security policy, and could contribute to the Global Agricultural Geo-Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM) coordinated by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

IMAGINES has delivered the following deliverables:

(i) operational processing lines interoperable with the existing CGLS infrastructure and able to run automatically at the global scale to generate global biophysical products disseminated by the CGLS

(ii) regional high resolution biophysical variables derived from multi-sensor satellite data

(iii) agricultural indicators, including the above-ground biomass, carbon and water fluxes, and drought indices resulting in the assimilation of the biophysical variables in the LDAS

(iv) maps of crop group and crop types updated along the season

(v) in situ measurements collected during 64 field campaigns over 23 different sites from 2013 to June 2016, resulting in 40 high resolution ground-based maps of LAI, FAPAR and FCover (http://www.fp7-imagines.eu/pages/services-and-products/ground-data.php) used, in the CGLS, for the validation of moderate resolution biophysical products.