Analysis of Open Access Data Sources for Application in Precision Agriculture

Precision agriculture uses new technologies to improve crop yields and increase profitability for farmers while reducing the inputs required to grow crops, such as land, water, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Environmental microclimate data (e.g., air and soil temperature or moisture) are needed as inputs to precision agriculture applications so that adequate decisions and agrotechnical measures can be applied in the fields. Most of the existing precision agriculture solutions for environmental and crop monitoring use locally deployed sensors as the main data source. Since the deployment and maintenance of physical sensors in the fields potentially involves significant costs and human effort, open-access data sources may be an effective complement to environmental data from deployed sensors, but the question remains whether open-access data sources are comparable to locally deployed sensors in terms of accuracy. This paper analyzes the correlation between open environmental data sources provided by the Copernicus ERA5-Land and Agri4Cast data sets, and data collected by locally deployed sensors to determine the extent to which open data sources can be used in precision agriculture.