Nimbo Soil Cover

Nimbo Soil Cover is Kermap's satellite analytics product for measuring how long and how evenly agricultural fields stay covered by living vegetation, a core practice of regenerative (soil-conservation) agriculture and of water-protection schemes. Programmes that reward farmers for cover crops need objective, comparable evidence across thousands of parcels, which field visits cannot supply at scale.

Kermap processes time series of Copernicus Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery with a proprietary pixel-level cloud mask and computes a vegetation index (NDVI) per field; a field counts as covered above an NDVI threshold of 0.25, checked against field data. Three field-level indicators result: soil cover duration (days covered), soil cover rate (share of the area covered) and a homogeneity score, each supplied with a data availability index. Results can be filtered by crop type, using Kermap's integrated crop identification, and aggregated to farms, administrative boundaries or custom reference territories. The archive starts with the 2018 harvest, updates run monthly to annually (end of season or in season), the minimum parcel size is 0.15 ha and coverage is worldwide on demand. Data is delivered as CSV downloads or through an API, and a sample can be explored in the Nimbo Earth Online platform. Through Kermap, the same soil-cover offering also covers cover-crop typology and cover-crop biomass, with estimation and modelling of the carbon stored by vegetation.

Kermap reports 85% average precision, 213 million hectares monitored since 2018 and more than ten sustainable-farming programmes supported. Named users include Nestlé, Saint Louis Sucre (a sample of 300 parcels farmed by 300 sugar-beet growers), Groupe Vivescia's Transitions programme and Eau du Grand Lyon; the method was co-built and calibrated in Earthworm Foundation's Living Soils programme.