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Environmental data

The grazing analysis can show how each management area's vegetation moved over the period beside how much it was used (decision D246). The figures come from Sentinel-2 imagery through the Copernicus Data Space, which a server reaches with its own account (decision D245). Without an account the analysis runs exactly as before and says once, in its warnings, that there is no vegetation layer.

The account

  1. Register at dataspace.copernicus.eu. An email address and a password are enough; the basic tier is free and carries a monthly processing quota.
  2. Sign in to the dashboard and create an OAuth client under the user settings. The client id and the secret are shown once.
  3. Open Server admin, Environmental data in Protect, put the client id and the secret in and press Save, then Test connection. The secret is stored encrypted and never shown again; a change takes effect on the next analysis run, without a restart.

A server may carry the account in its environment instead, as COPERNICUS_CLIENT_ID and COPERNICUS_CLIENT_SECRET (in the vaulted host variables for an Ansible-managed server, never in the repository, then --tags env-refresh to deploy them). What is set on the page wins; the environment stands in while the page is empty, and the page says so.

A large deployment can ask Copernicus for a service account instead, through their help centre with a project description; the credentials go in the same place.

Turning the layer off for one run

The vegetation layer is the slowest part of a grazing run. The run form has a Vegetation per area switch under the method options; off, the run does everything else exactly as before and asks the provider nothing.

What it costs

One grazing run with a landscape layer is one batch job on their side: the areas' bounding box, the period, the cloud mask and a weekly mean. Two small areas over two months took about four and a half minutes and five credits on 2026-09-17. A run reads the cache first (environment_samples, one row per area, week and layer) and asks the provider only for the weeks it does not hold, so a rerun, a comparison period and the next month's report cost only what is new. A week that has not ended yet is never cached, because a cloud-free pass may still come, so a period that runs up to today asks for its last week again every time.

What Protect asks for

The vegetation index (NDVI) per area and week: Sentinel-2 level 2A, the scene classification's cloud mask, the red and near-infrared bands, the weekly mean per pixel and then the mean per area and per cell of the map's mosaic (both go up in one job, so the mosaic costs no second run). Protect stores the weekly numbers, never the imagery. Weeks without a cloud-free observation are kept as gaps, and a period where fewer than half the weeks have one is marked in the run's warnings.

When it fails

A provider that cannot answer (no credits, an outage, a job that ends in error) never fails a run: the analysis completes without the layer and carries a warning that says what happened. The same holds when no account is set up. Test connection on the Environmental data page asks for a token and the collection, which costs no processing quota, so it tells an administrator whether the account works without spending anything.