In: Wagner W., Szekely, B. (eds.): ISPRS TC VII Symposium - 100 Years ISPRS, Vienna, Austria, July 5-7, 2010, IAPRS, Vol. XXXVIII, Part 7B 
2 GOOD AGRICULTURAL CONDITION 
In order to suggest a robust and plausible concept of GAC, current 
legal definitions within regulations were consulted. The driver 
behind the need for a GAC concept in Bulgaria is Council Regu 
lation 73/2009, Article 124 paragraph 1, which states: 
“For Bulgaria and Romania, the agricultural area under the sin 
gle area payment scheme shall be the part of its utilised agri 
cultural area which is maintained in good agricultural condition, 
whether or not in production, where appropriate adjusted in ac 
cordance with the objective and non-discriminatory criteria to be 
set by Bulgaria or Romania after approval by the Commission. ” 
According to this statement, ‘utilised agricultural area’ subject to 
the Single Area Payments Scheme (SAPS) must be maintained 
in ‘good agricultural condition’, even if the land is not in pro 
duction. The utilised agricultural area is defined as ‘the total 
area taken up by arable land, permanent grassland, permanent 
crops and kitchen gardens ...’ in Regulation 73/2009 Art 124 
with definitions of other terms in current EU regulations: arable 
land [380/2009 Art 1 s2(a)], permanent grassland [380/2009 Art 
1 s2(b)], permanent crops [370/2009 Art 1 (b)] and kitchen gar 
dens [1444/2002 Annex 1]. This definition is important to the 
foundation of GAC concept as it lists the main land cover types, 
which can represent eligible land, but also can be easily detected 
(monitored) on the ground or though remote sensing data. By 
integrating the definitions from regulations, GAC (for Bulgaria) 
can be defined as follows: 
Definition: Good Agricultural Condition shall apply to accessi 
ble land which is maintained as active, or has the potential to 
become active, agricultural area or agricultural activity within a 
reference parcel. 
Definitions for agricultural area and agricultural activity are de 
fined in Regulation 73/2009 Art 2 while the reference parcel is 
defined in Regulation 796/2004 Art 2 (26). The two key elements 
in the proposed GAC definition are: 
• the potential of the land to become agricultural: the land 
shall have the potential to produce biomass either due to its 
natural properties or due to the implementations of certain 
standard agriculture activities, a general European farmer 
can implement. 
• the accessibility of the land: there are no obstacles, neither 
natural nor man-made, preventing the access and use of the 
land for agriculture activities. 
For a consistent technical framework, which will allow a proper 
classification of the agricultural land in GAC, the proposed def 
inition lays a good foundation to build methodology. However, 
another challenge for GAC analysis in Bulgaria (as well as Ro 
mania) is the significant decline of the Utilised Agricultural Area 
(UAA) in Bulgaria (as well as Romania) in the last few decades 
mainly due to farmland abandonment and soil sealing. There 
are two types of “abandoned” land in Bulgaria: (1) land, not- 
cultivated for a maximum of 3 years, which could be easily re 
covered with the minimum agronomic measures applied; and (2) 
“deserted” land, not-cultivated for more than 3 years, and is more 
difficult to be recovered. The first case could be definitely consid 
ered as long fallow and part of arable land (according to EU def 
inition), while the second case is considered really “abandoned”. 
Since Bulgaria became an EU member, the interest to the “aban 
doned” land increased, due to the possibilities given by EU Com 
mon Agriculture Policy to receive subsidies for its utilization. In 
this respect, a certain portion of this “abandoned” land, even if 
currently not utilised, can be brought back into use by the farm 
ers, at any given moment, and thus should be considered po 
tentially part of the “SAPS envelope”. From a physiognomic- 
structural (biotic or abiotic) aspect, land not cultivated for sev 
eral years, may acquire certain land cover properties, common to 
natural vegetation. This means that an estimation of the land in 
GAC, based on detection of the land currently under cultivation 
(using remote sensing), will not be correct, as it will omit the 
former agricultural areas (presently appearing as naturally vege 
tated), which can be brought back into use through the applica 
tion of common agriculture practices. Supplementary informa 
tion from the LPIS or other sources such as NATURA 2000 1 may 
be needed to support the interpretation. To incorporate and man 
age correctly all possible cases of land cover, the features cap 
tured during the classification, will be grouped in three distinc 
tive categories according to the physiognomic-structural point of 
view and to the LPIS information: 
• GAC includes land cover features which can be classified as 
agricultural land being in GAC, 
• Potential non-GAC includes land cover features which are 
unlikely to represent agricultural land in GAC; however, a 
cross-check using up-to-date VHR data or a rapid field visit 
is necessary to finalise conclusions, 
• Non-GAC includes land cover features which cannot be, and 
have no potential to be, agricultural land in GAC. 
3 STUDY AREA 
After joining to the EU in 2007, Bulgaria adopted the legislation 
of the European Community for management and monitoring of 
their agricultural land and benefit payments. Bulgaria is approxi 
mately 111.000 km 2 in size, extending from the western bound 
aries of the Black Sea to Serbia and FYROM on the East. The 
country borders Romania on the North and Turkey and Greece 
on the South. The northern boundary follows closely the Danube 
River. To capture the diversity of landscape within the coun 
try, the study area has been divided (stratified) into three testing 
zones: Zone 1-Kardzhali (KARD); Zone 2-Plovdiv (PLOV) and 
Zone 3-Vama (VARN). Two additional ‘back-up’ zones, were 
also selected in the event suitable RapidEye imagery over the 
main zones could not be obtained. This paper presents the analy 
sis and results obtained for the KARD zone. 
Figure 1: Map of Bulgaria and Test zones. 
The KARD zone is located in a highly segmented part of Strumni 
Ridge, situated in the area of Eastern Rhodope, Bulgaria. The 
landscape is hilly to mountainous, with an average altitude of 
444 meters. The climate is mild to Mediterranean with an aver 
age annual temperature about 11 °C, and an average annual rain 
fall between 650-700mm. Droughts are common during the sum 
mer. The soil, having limited mineral chemical elements, makes 
1 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/index_en.htm