The Danube Basin has been hit by several droughts in the last few years. As climate change makes weather extremes and temperature records in late winter and early spring more likely, water availability and irrigation possibilities become more important. In this paper, the crop water demand at field and national scale within the Danube Basin is presented using a dense time series of multispectral Sentinel-2 data, for crop type maps derived with deep learning techniques and physically-based models for crop parameter retrieval and crop growth modelling.

The Food Security Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) supported by ESA is a cloud platform for the extraction of information from EO data for services in the food security sector. To respond to the needs of its large user community, the platform is developed in an agile mode in close coordination with its users. Thereby it targets to foster smart, data-intensive agricultural and aquacultural applications in the scientific, private and public domain. During the first two years of platform development, the Food Security TEP project team has deployed a number of service pilot applications. This paper presents those focusing on the support of micro-financing and irrigation for African farmers and on supporting coastal aquaculture development in Africa.