Very High-Resolution satellite imagery (e.g. resolution below 1m), holds the potential to enhance digitalization of agricultural practices by providing accurate and timely information on crops at a regional and national level. These images can identify (and monitor) single trees and plants, monitor with better precision the contours of parcels and thus complement publicly available Copernicus imagery. Nonetheless, VHR imagery is currently not openly available to the public, being only “freely” accessible to Public Administration or Research Teams via Copernicus Services and / or ESA for specific research purposes. For operational services, entities need to purchase imagery to commercial imagery providers which poses a burden in terms of costs and public procurement. In Portugal different entities have acquired national coverages of the country for different purposes (e.g., IFAP as an agriculture Paying Agency or DGT to produce accurate cartography that can complement and eventually substitute aerial photography). However, when acquired, this imagery has not been easily available to other users be it in public administration, research centers or even companies and has been mostly only used by the entity that purchased it. The reasons for this are utilization license limitations and a lack of a centralized public platform to access (and download) them. For this reason, the Portuguese Space Agency aims to make a centralized acquisition of national VHR imagery coverages and make it available to Public Administration, Research Centers and companies, when developing services for the latter (by acquiring the necessary licenses). This way public resources will be optimized, and the different entities will benefit from the added value of these images. These images will be stored in a cloud/distributed infrastructure with computational capabilities to facilitate access but also the development of algorithms and operational services (leveraging as well other data sources such as Copernicus, in-situ sensors, etc.). Support for the following tasks would be appreciated: technical expertise for defining architecture and options, training, access to similar use cases and approaches.

Source: Annual AgData Use Case Summit 2026 booklet.

• 3.1.3.1 Service Cloud & network of data-hubs
• 3.1.3.4 Discoverability & composability of services