Summer 2022 highlighted all the fragilities of the Italian agricultural system related to water supply. Not irrigated crops were deeply affected by drought, causing a significant yield loss and considerably affecting livestock and food market. Drought is known to be related to climate change and global warming; but, additionally, a structural lack of water storage from glaciers and snow an be recorded. The increasing number of extreme events (floods, fires and droughts) remind about the need of a forecasting system able to map location and time where/when an extreme event effects crops. Earth Observation (EO) and Geoinformation represent a great opportunity for environmental monitoring especially if based on continuated open data. Many experiences are currently proposed works for crop monitoring at the farm scale; nevertheless, a system aiming at monitoring/ managing water supply to crops at the regional/national scale for institutional purposes is currently missing. In this project, open EO products, coupled with ground-based data, will be used as the basis for the development of a prototypal service for mapping and forecasting drought effects on crops useful for public institutions (like regions or basin authorises). In particular EO4DEMOC will be intended to be operational at Italian national level and developed around open geodata mainly from the Copernicus/MODIS archives. Machine learning and physically-based techniques will be considered and coupled with cloud computing facilities and open-source tools. Applicants' different skills will ensure rapid progress in this emerging field of remote sensing application to advance the knowledge in the national context and raise awareness among the scientific community, policymakers, stakeholders and citizens on the sustainable development/management of water supply for agricultural purposes. In particular: (i) EO4DEMOC will systematise currently
unrelated information, available from multiple and open sources/archives, to support drought monitoring and management at the national scale proposing an harmonised approach; (ii) it will exploit both open ground data from public sensor networks and EO data - still under-used in Italy; (iii) it will provide new insights about relationship between drought and environmental impacts, explicitly
tailored for our country. More specifically, EO4DEMOC will produce the following outputs of economic, industrial, environmental and social relevance for our country: (i) Production of maps continuely locating spatio-temporal crop anomalies in terms of evapotranspiration, thermal state or vigour. These are retained essential for institutions to assess water supply and consistency for agricultural areas in a time where climate change are heavinly impacting; (ii) Development of a prototype service/platform for crop monitoring from space aimed at pro-actively managing drought events affecting crops and giving in-season estimate of potential economic loss.