About

AVL’s offer to the science community

Agriculture Virtual Laboratory strives to make an attractive offer to the science community for implementing and executing end-to-end workflows with EO data and derived products. Embracing open science principles, AVL will enable researchers to access, share, visualise, process and validate a variety of relevant data sets. Moreover, algorithms and workflows developed within the virtual laboratory may be published and shared, thus fostering collaboration at all stages of research.

To this end, the AVL system integrates several components,

• a web-based Workspace including a Jupyter Service, a visualisation service, the interface to the Thematic Processing subsystem, and an overview of own data and algorithms,
• the Thematic Processing Subsystem offering an engine for numerous common workflows and tools for agriculture research, e.g. Sen2Agri and Sen4CAP but also generic tools such as SNAP, gdal, and Orfeo,
• the Exploitation Subsystem providing convenient access to all data in a common analysis-ready format thus greatly facilitating the development and execution of complex workflows involving multiple datasets.
• The data access layer, connecting heterogeneous data sets from different sources to AVL, hence greatly decreasing the burden of data management for researchers.

Initially funded as a 36months project by the European Space Agency, the AVL is intended to be a community based, long-term initiative facilitating the continuous development of expertise and knowledge in agricultural monitoring and modelling based on the evolving Earth Observation (EO) capabilities. AVL is implemented by a strong, complementary team of four institutions, all experts in their respective field.

The AVL Team

This project requires the complementary expertise of the thematic “agriculture” on the one hand, and EO data and processing, cloud computing and software development on the other hand. 

The team composed of Brockmann Consult GmbH, UCLouvain, C-S Romania and Sinergise LTD combine these expertise in a complementary, but still overlapping manner.