Deliverable 2.2 - Map of the Estimated Distribution of Small Farms in each Reference Region

The project Small Farms, Small Food Business and Sustainable Food Security (SALSA) intends to assess the role of small farms and small food business in terms of food production and food security. One important first step in doing this is to test and develop methods and tools able to produce accurate and useful information about small farms. It is as such that SALSA work package 2 (WP2) intends to demonstrate the capabilities and usefulness of Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite as a data-based method for small farms monitoring, specifically in providing information on the small farms distribution (where are they?), crop types (crop diversity), crop area extent (crop acreage), and yield estimates (crop production) to objectively quantify the crop production capabilities of small farms. By considering a gradient of 30 reference regions in Europe and in Africa, the capabilities of Sentinel-2A will be tested in very differently structured farm landscapes, allowing a better understanding of the accuracy and effectiveness of Sentinel-2A for small farms monitoring.

WP2 encompasses four main tasks, namely (i) tasks 2.1 small farms distribution in Europe, (ii) task 2.2 selection of the reference regions; (iii) task 2.3 small farms characterization in the reference regions; and (iv) predictive modelling. This report focuses on the task 2.3., which has two main outputs: a) a map presenting an estimate of the spatial distribution of small farms in each reference region; and b) a crop type map in small farms context in each reference region. According to the deliverable D.2.2, only the first output of the task 2.3 is presented in this report, being posteriorly reported the crop type map (output b) on the deliverable D.2.3.

It is as such that this report aims to show the obtained maps of small farms distribution in each reference region by using Sentinel-2A-derived data, as well as a summary of the main methodological steps and an quantitative assessment of the Sentinel-2A accuracy in estimating small-scale farms distribution.