How the EU’s NitroScope project is trying to close long-standing gaps in nitrogen monitoring, policy and on-farm decision-making.
Nitrogen has been regulated in agriculture for a long time. It appears in nutrient plans and compliance frameworks, but has proven difficult to track once it is applied in the field.
In the EU, agriculture is the main source of nitrous oxide emissions, a gas with a global warming potential of nearly 300 times that of carbon dioxide. That impact traces back to how nitrogen is used in fields. Nitrogen is indispensable for crop growth, but in a typical season, only about half of the nitrogen applied is absorbed up by crops. The remainder is lost to the environment. By the time measurements are taken, much of that nitrogen has already moved on, which is one reason they have been so difficult to track with confidence.
Nitroscope grew out of that gap. Launched late 2025 under the Horizon Europe program, the project brings together 25 partners from across Europe, including the Ghent University, to take a closer look at how nitrogen actually behaves in real farming systems.
The kick off meeting in Ghent in November 2025). Image source: Nitroscope
“NitroScope will generate the most detailed picture yet of Europe’s nitrogen flows, helping farmers and decision-makers take concrete steps toward sustainable soil management,” said professor Abdul Mouazen at Ghent University, and coordinator of NitroScope. “By combining cutting-edge science with practical tools, we aim to make nitrogen efficiency a reality across Europe”.
EarthDaily is involved in the project alongside partners drawn from research, academia, technology and applied agriculture. The collaboration began in late 2025, following an initial meeting at Ghent University, and will continue through 2029.
Nitrogen is difficult because it is highly context dependent, especially in agriculture. Some of that complexity starts in the soil itself.
Taken together, these interactions make nitrogen losses highly sensitive to timing and local conditions on the ground. Timing often matters as much as quantity. When fertilizer goes on at the right moment, crops are more likely to take it up. Miss that window, and local conditions begin to dominate -- soil structure, temperature, crop type, rooting depth and whatever weather follows.
Most regulatory and reporting frameworks were not built to capture that kind of variability. They tend to work with fixed assumptions based on regional statistics, even though outcomes in the field are shaped by short windows, changing conditions and very local context.
This is largely why nitrogen outcomes have remained resistant to one-size-fits-all rules and broad assumptions.
Rather than centering on a single tool or intervention, the project is concerned with building a shared, measurement-led view of nitrogen movement across different soils, climates and management practices.
Part of the problem in measuring nitrogen losses is structural. Measurements tend to be local and intermittent. Models work at broader scales but smooth over short-term events. Data is collected for different purposes and rarely lines up cleanly.
NitroScope is trying to close that gap by bringing measurement, modeling and data infrastructure into closer alignment.
The intent is not simply to generate new datasets, but to connect measurement, modeling and decision support into a system that can inform both farm-level management and policy evaluation.
EarthDaily is a partner in the NitroScope consortium, contributing expertise in agricultural analytics and large-scale satellite-based monitoring.
While nitrogen itself cannot be measured directly from space, it does not move independently of crops, soils and management. Crop development, phenology, field-level variability and stress patterns all influence nitrogen uptake and loss, and these dynamics are visible through satellite observation. Within NitroScope, this spatial continuity helps connect detailed measurements from instrumented sites to broader agricultural landscapes, supporting comparability and scaling across regions.
EarthDaily’s contribution builds on operational experience from digital agriculture deployments where nitrogen-use efficiency improvements have already been demonstrated in practice. In collaborations with partners such as WANAKA in France and Frontier Agriculture in the UK, EarthDaily’s data-driven agronomic insights have delivered consistent improvements of around 15% in nitrogen-use efficiency.
Wanaka works with EarthDaily to support field-level nitrogen decisions, optimizing costs and more than doubling land-monitoring capacity while allowing agronomy teams to focus on advisory work.
In the context of NitroScope, these results matter because they show how integrated data can translate into measurable outcomes. At scale, improvements of this magnitude shift nitrogen management from marginal optimization toward system-level impact.
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NitroScope is arriving at a moment when Europe’s nitrogen policies are under growing strain. Climate commitments are pushing governments to account more seriously for non-CO₂ emissions, while water regulations are shifting from process-driven compliance toward evidence of real improvement on the ground.
Rather than tightening rules without improving visibility, NitroScope focuses first on seeing the system more clearly and recognizing that effective intervention depends on understanding where, when and why losses occur.
Decisions about nitrogen are often made during the planning phase, using estimated risk of losses, and rarely changed based on actual conditions. Much of the work within NitroScope is aimed at providing an alert in case of risk of nitrogen leaching, or in case of low measured Nitrogen crop nutrition status is where we can help. By combining continuous field measurements with broader monitoring and analysis, the project is focused on identifying risk earlier -- when conditions such as weather, soil moisture and crop stage begin to align in ways that make losses more likely.
The intent is to make them visible in time to inform decisions, rather than documenting impacts only after nitrogen has already moved through the system.
That way of working is beginning to influence environmental policy more broadly. Instead of relying almost entirely on retrospective accounts, there is increasing attention on managing risk as it unfolds, using information that arrives in time to shape decisions.