Understanding how COVID-19 transformed people’s mobility and territorial activities for ESA RACE
In the summer of 2020, the EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY (ESA) and the EUROPEAN COMMISSION created the RACE (Rapid Action Coronavirus Earth Observation) project. This project, together with the related digital platform, focuses on monitoring and analysing numerous environmental and economic parameters to support decision-making during the pandemic crisis in the most effective way.
MAIN RESULTS
01.
Innovative Analysis Methodology
The pilot project developed an innovative methodology to quantify the presence and mobility of agricultural workers with a level of detail that could not be achieved through traditional analytical approaches.
02.
Analysis of the Pandemic’s Impact
The analyses objectively confirmed the impact of the spring 2020 restrictions on agricultural activities, highlighting the postponement of field preparation operations.
03.
Monitoring Agricultural Activity
The study identified a significant increase in the presence of agricultural workers in August 2020 compared with the previous year, enabling the monitoring of seasonal activity patterns.
04.
Territorial Presence Analysis
The analyses highlighted changes in the presence of agricultural workers across the territory, relating them to agricultural production trends during the 2020 restriction period.
THE ANALYSIS
The dynamics of work in the fields were analyzed according to two main areas in the province of Foggia.
The areas of interest were identified in detail through the superimposition of satellite images and telephone cells, making sure to exclude all the urbanized areas. The use of vegetation indices and other parameters from satellite images allowed to classify agricultural fields based on the prevailing vegetation and to monitor their evolution over time according to seeding and harvesting cycles.
Research in the areas thus defined focused on two main aspects:
The presences of agricultural workers in the summer of the years 2019 and 2020
The mobility patterns of the same workers during field preparation and harvesting.
Two main groups of analysis were defined accordingly:
Quantification and trend of presences with different details, from time slots to single days and monthly aggregations
Development of Origin/Destination (O/D) matrices for mobility.
PROFILED USERS
Users were categorized according to their nationality:
Italians, I.e. users with SIM cards registered with the Italian country code
Foreigners, further divided into: • Foreigners with Italian SIM cards, i.e. users with SIM cards registered with the Italian country code and an additional code that indicates a foreigner user • Foreigners with foreign SIM cards, i.e. users with SIM cards registered with a foreign country code
These profiles were then further enriched with the identification of the worker’s origin in relation to her usual place of residence, resulting in two additional subgroups:
Workers who live in the area where they work
Workers who live in a different area than their work area
CONCLUSIONS
This study and the platform prepared by ESA demonstrated how the innovative and large-scale use of Earth-observation data integrated with other data such as anonymized mobile phone data can help the timely identification of social and economic changes caused by sudden and large-scale events such as the Covid-19 pandemic more quickly and with new perspectives.