A 0.8 ha mountain pasture at Plaisia (Malakasiou), North Tzoumerka, Greece, is being set up as a field laboratory to test pasture, tree and crop land uses and to monitor them with satellite vegetation indices.
The plot is a five-sided parcel of about 77 × 105 m on a rainfed grassland used for grazing. It has no irrigation, sensors or weather station yet, which makes the current season a clean baseline before any treatment is applied.
The plan shows the parcel on the Sentinel-2 10 m pixel grid (UTM zone 34N). Only pixels that fall completely inside the boundary are free of mixing with neighbouring land. The zones will be aligned to this grid so that each treatment is observed by whole pixels.
Boundary held in EGSA87 (EPSG:2100) and WGS84; grid origin 497270 E, 4370820 N.
The field is divided into eight equal zones of about 1,000 m² each. Which pasture or land-use treatment goes to each zone will be decided after the multi-year baseline analysis and a soil survey, so that soil and moisture differences do not bias the comparison. The first treatments are planned for 2027.
| Code | Candidate treatment | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| C | Natural pasture, untreated | Control and continuation of the baseline series |
| VO | Common vetch + oat forage mixture | High-biomass rainfed forage; nitrogen fixation by the legume |
| P | Natural pasture + phosphorus fertilisation | Improvement without tillage |
| CL | Clover oversowing into the existing sward | Legume enrichment with minimal disturbance |
| SP | Silvopasture: pasture with widely spaced trees | Shade, fodder and timber while keeping grazing |
| T | Timber trees (e.g. walnut, wild cherry) | Long-term timber for private use; subject to forestry service advice |
| VG | Small vegetable plots (possible) | Intensive use on the best soil, if the baseline supports it |
Each zone is followed through NDVI, NDRE and NDMI time series, read together with soil analyses and an on-site weather station. A 1,000 m² zone holds only about ten Sentinel-2 pixels (10 m); if data access is granted, PlanetScope (3 m) would give about a hundred, and the two are compared for how well they separate the zones and track the establishment of new pasture and young trees.
The data for the plot are being brought together in SmartAG, an open-source monitoring stack that runs on the researcher's own server. Each source is collected on a schedule, stored per pixel and per day, and analysed alongside the field records. Some components, such as PlanetScope ingestion and alerts, will be added as the experiment starts.
The data will be followed live in Home Assistant, which runs on a separate machine and connects to the server over an encrypted SSL link, together with an OpenClaw AI agent (ChatGPT via OAuth). The agent sends daily, weekly and monthly reports, and an alert whenever extreme weather is forecast or recorded at the plot.
The charts are refreshed automatically every night from the SmartAG database. Only open data from the Copernicus programme and the ERA5 reanalysis are shown.
These indicators complement the charts with quality checks and exploratory statistics. They do not replace the final analysis by experimental zone.
Sources: Copernicus Sentinel-2 L2A (ESA) · ERA5 (ECMWF / Copernicus Climate Change Service).
All satellite data are used exclusively for non-commercial academic research and education within the MSc programme Precision Agriculture Applications (EGA) of the Hellenic Open University and the University of Patras. Commercial imagery is not redistributed; only derived indices and results appear in course work and publications.
MSc student, Hellenic Open University
Programme page: eap.gr – Precision Agriculture Applications
Plot-mean NDVI per date from clear (cloud-free) pixels. Rainfall, temperature and soil moisture: ERA5-Land (daily means, 9 km). Only aggregate values are shown.
Planet Team (2026). Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://api.planet.com.