TAMPA, Fla. — Europe has contracted Thales Alenia Space to develop a digital twin of agricultural systems, combining satellite data and crop modeling to support sustainable and climate-resilient farming practices across the continent.
The space manufacturing company, a joint venture between Thales of France and Leonardo of Italy, outlined plans March 27 to start offering early digital engineering tools by the end of 2026 for the European Space Agency’s SaveCrops4EU project.
SaveCrops4EU is part of ESA’s Digital Twin Earth program, which aims to build interactive, high-precision digital replicas of Earth systems to support policy decisions and climate adaptation.
These models combine satellite data, simulation tools and artificial intelligence to help users explore, visualize and test different scenarios and their real-world outcomes.
Sander Rouwette, Thales Alenia Space’s lead for SaveCrops4EU, said the project would fuse data from Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation satellite missions, notably Sentinel 1 and 2, with surface temperature, evapotranspiration and other land measurements.
Part of the SaveCrops4EU mission involves refining specific use cases in collaboration with partners across four countries. The focus areas include:
Belgium: Fertilization management, application advice and end-of-season nutrient levels with direct environmental impacts.
Hungary: Enhancing an existing service by integrating additional data, helping farmers with loan applications and insurance assessments.
Germany: Monitoring crop stress and using simulations to evaluate the yield impacts of alternative farm management strategies.
Spain: Addressing irrigation and drought issues, including optimizing surface water use and analyzing soil conditions for yield forecasting.
“We aim to provide as much functionality as possible within the scope of this first solution,” Rouwette said via email.
“Maintainability and extensibility are key drivers of the technical design to ensure that future system requirements, envisioned but beyond the scope of this specific project, can be integrated and made available to users as soon as possible.”
He said the ESA contract provides sufficient funding to develop a “pre-operational solution” but did not provide details.
Thales Alenia Space aims to build on its experience in developing a digital twin for flood prediction in 2023, which served as a proof of concept for ESA’s Digital Twin Earth program. That system uses satellite and forecast data to automatically generate flood extent maps, assess risk to nearby infrastructure and send early warnings with probabilistic alerts.
The flood twin also featured modular architecture, allowing the integration of various models and user interfaces for different types of users, such as civil protection agencies and urban planners, while sharing a common scientific core.
Although it remains unclear whether the agricultural digital twin would ultimately be commercialized, Rouwette said the broader vision for these platforms includes a free basic version with optional enhanced features.
Thales Alenia Space is leading the project in collaboration with a European consortium, including agricultural experts from the Walloon Agricultural Research Center and CropOM, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology as scientific lead, the University of Valencia for remote sensing and Forschungszentrum Jülich for bioscience and geoscience simulation.
