Length of Europe's off-season second-crop seasons (Copernicus)
What it measures. Measures how many days a secondary, off-season crop grew in each field, ranging from about 40 days up to a full year.
How it's made. Produced yearly from 2017 onward from satellite vegetation data, by the EU's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service at 10-metre resolution across Europe's 38 countries, including French overseas territories.
How & where you'd use it. Helps monitor cover-cropping and off-season farming over time, supporting policies that aim to prevent soil degradation and track changing cropping practices.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2017-01-01 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
The Secondary Crops Duration (CPSCD) dataset provides information on the length of the secondary crop growing season, expressed in days (range: 40–366). The secondary season layers offer valuable information for assessing policy implementation to prevent soil degradation and for monitoring cropping changes during off-season periods over time at regional and national level. This dataset is provided annually starting with 2017 in 10-metre rasters (fully conformant with the EEA reference grid) in 100 × 100 km tiles covering the EEA-38 countries. The HRL Secondary Crops Duration product is part of the European Union's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. This dataset includes data from the French Overseas Territories (DOMs).
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["clms_vlcc_secondary-crop-duration_europe_10m_yearly_v1"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC