Sen4MUN: A Prototypal Service for the Distribution of Contributions to the European Municipalities from Copernicus Satellite Imagery. A Case in Aosta Valley (NW Italy)

Recently, the European space program Copernicus’ Sentinel missions have allowed to develop several application services. One of them is the Sen4CAP system for the payment of contribution and control in agriculture according to the Common Agricultural Policy in light of the EU regulation (N. 746/2018). Nowadays, the technological transfer offered by remote sensing has permitted to rationalize and rethink many contribution methodologies at different scales. In this regard, to strengthen the use of free satellite data in ordinary administrative workflows, this work aims to evaluate the feasibility and prototypal development of a possible service called Sen4MUN for the distribution of contributions yearly allocated to local municipalities and scalable to all European regions. The analysis was focused on considering the Aosta Valley Autonomous Region, NW Italy. A comparison between the Ordinary Workflow (OW) and the Sen4MUN approach which is based on yearly Land Cover classification according to EAGLE guidelines was performed by applying a 20 m buffer onto urban class (LCb). This buffer was performed according to EEA-ISPRA soil consumption guidelines to avoid underestimating some areas that are difficult to map with Sentinel due to sensor limits and spectral mixing issues. The roads were included considering updated GIS databases. In particular, the assessment of the mapped urban anthropic surfaces used to quantify the contribution of adopting the two approaches was realized. An overall MAE of 0.82 km2 was computed involving LCb and OW demonstrating the effectiveness of Sen4MUN. The approach developed seems to be capable of providing useful data for contribution purposes to Public Administration.