Assessments on the impact of high-resolution-sensor pixel sizes for common agricultural policy and smart farming services in European regions

High-resolution (5–50 m) remote sensing satellite sensors provide a reliable, free and open data infrastructure for public and private agriculture and land use services. The further market penetration of these services critically depends on the fraction of agricultural fields and area that the services can cover. EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and smart farming services require a minimum of spectrally pure measurements per agricultural field. The impact of pixel size on the coverage of agriculture is studied in this paper considering present free and open optical sensors (Sentinel-2 and LANDSAT). It further studies the implications of the selection of spatial resolution of planned extensions of these sensors, i.e. the next generation of Sentinel-2, as well as Copernicus’s hyperspectral CHIME and thermal LSTM future candidate missions.