FASFC strengthens its field inspections with ArcGIS Pro and Field Maps

The Belgian federal agency is testing Esri tools to validate the relevance of spatial analysis in its workflow. Honored with a 2025 SAG Award, this project represents a strategic shift in plant health surveillance and territorial monitoring.

It’s not just about grain monitoring… thanks to ArcGIS Field Maps, they’re also keeping an eye on potato tubers and apple trees! In Belgium, the FASFC has been conducting a large-scale pilot for several months to streamline its field operations. The goal: validate the usefulness of GIS and spatial analysis in its operational tasks.

FASFC stands for the Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain. It oversees a wide range of inspection activities from farm to fork—from producers to consumers—including plant protection, animal health monitoring, and food safety at every stage. Its reach spans farms, slaughterhouses, and food industries, all the way to shops and restaurants.

The agency employs around 1,380 people, supported by nearly 600 field officers responsible for inspections and analyses. Most of its staff have scientific or technical backgrounds—bachelor's degrees in agronomy or dietetics, veterinarians, or bioengineers. Its personnel are spread across its central headquarters in Brussels, nine local control units (LCUs), and five accredited in-house laboratories. It also relies on a network of external service providers for specific tasks.

Although FASFC's responsibilities are broad, the current proof of concept (POC)—developed with Esri Belux—focuses on plant health threats. “People are familiar with diseases like avian flu that affect animals, but there are also many diseases and pests that affect plants, crops, or trees,” explains Michaël Colson, Director of Control Policy in the Plant Protection and Plant Product Safety Services.

With 20 years at FASFC, Colson—himself a bioengineer—has seen methods evolve from paper and road maps to GPS and now GIS tools. He leads this ambitious project to modernize field control operations through a fully geospatial approach. The goal is to offer LCUs and central services a fully digital process—from inspection planning to result analysis. “It’s about improving data collection quality and analysis capacity in the field by standardizing tools across the agency,” he says.

Until now, GIS was used inconsistently, with tools like Google Maps, QGIS, or Excel. The agency has no dedicated geomatics team, but FASFC's crisis unit has pioneered GIS map creation to support disease outbreak response (e.g., avian flu) or highlight zones contaminated by environmental pollutants like PFAS, PCBs, or dioxins.

The crisis unit only switched to ArcGIS three years ago, so this project marks a major shift. With Field Maps, the agency is now exploring an integrated and standardized approach connected to a centralized national database.

The POC is currently running in two pilot provinces: Liège and West Flanders. “We formed a working group of five people with diverse profiles—from IT to central control administration to operationalize the needs, including someone from the crisis unit. The steering committee also includes management representatives. Around ten additional people in the local control units are involved in using ArcGIS Pro and Field Maps,” says Colson. These two LCUs use ArcGIS Pro to carry out vector operations to prepare data collection.

More specifically, FASFC is testing ArcGIS for two main plant health monitoring tasks:

1. Soil sampling for seed potato production.

2. Monitoring green spaces for bacterial diseases like fire blight in buffer zones around apple and pear tree nurseries.

In the first case, inspectors collect soil samples to detect the presence of Globodera cysts, a phytoparasitic nematode. This demanding task occurs in winter, during which about 2,000 plots must be sampled to ensure the nematode is absent. Each plot must be divided into 1-hectare blocks, and 100 samples are taken per hectare using a soil auger—resulting in about 4,500 samples per year across Belgium.

Currently, methods are not standardized, and each LCU has its own system to divide plots. GIS tools are extremely valuable for automating the division of plots into 1-hectare blocks at a chosen angle. “We start by integrating annual vector parcel data from regional authorities—data declared by farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy,” explains Colson. “This geodata layer provides polygon geometries that simplify the preparation of field sampling layers.”

Such data sharing is crucial since plant health responsibilities in Belgium are split between the federal level (quarantine pests) and the regions (non-quarantine regulated pests).

For sampling prep, inspectors can assign the crop type (e.g., certified seed potatoes, farm seed potatoes, ornamental plants). Using Field Maps, the agent fills in fields with their name, sampling date, and sample number, directly scanning the barcode on the label. Comments can be added, and each sample is geolocated, barcoded, and linked to the parcel geometry. Lab results can then be tied back to the parcel and used to assess the plot’s Globodera status.

Each mission generates structured geospatial data, feeding into a national database on ArcGIS Online and stored securely in the federal G-Cloud (Microsoft Azure). This system provides a georeferenced national overview. “While this isn’t a crisis situation, real-time data collection could easily be added, as our crisis unit does. We could also create risk point layers based on EU or national criteria to identify high-priority zones,” Colson notes.

This second POC phase will be tested in the summer. The goal is to detect regulated harmful organisms in Belgium. Field agents inspect trees and vegetation around high-risk locations (like ports or airports) for invasive pests or diseases (insects, fungi, viruses, bacteria). “Ports like Antwerp or airports like Liège and Zaventem receive products from third countries and need extra vigilance,” says Colson. They define risk zones and identify potentially affected plant species—pines, ash trees, certain crops, etc. A layer of inspection objects is created with scheduled inspections to detect issues like Xylella fastidiosa.

Specifically, fire blight monitoring involves checking pear, apple, or hawthorn trees in officially recognized buffer zones (min. 50 km²) used to grow fruit trees for shipment to protected zones in the EU. These zones are officially disease-free. If fire blight is detected (e.g., in a nearby hawthorn hedge), all plant shipments within a 500-meter radius are banned. The infection site is marked in red on the map and special measures are taken to eliminate the bacteria.

For other quarantine pests like wood-boring insects, if harmful organisms are found, the EU requires the felling of all sensitive trees within a set perimeter. The crisis unit is immediately activated to help municipalities and provinces with maps to locate outbreaks, set up surveillance zones, and organize precise tree removals to prevent spread.

Alongside the pilot, Esri Belux is helping the agency explore broader GIS potential—for example, using ArcGIS Dashboards or ArcGIS Hub for data dissemination.

“For now, our focus is operational, and we’re setting up training sessions at headquarters and local units,” says Colson. “Since we don’t have a dedicated GIS team, we’re using a ‘teach-the-teacher’ strategy to help colleagues gain hands-on skills.” This will build a knowledge network, enabling dozens of people to be trained while keeping training costs in check.

One inspector is already creating technical guides for future users who will prepare maps using ArcGIS and Field Maps. The agency also plans to appoint GIS ambassadors to gradually build internal expertise. “We want to train people while giving them some autonomy—so they can explore GIS tools themselves and naturally integrate them into their daily work, boosting our overall efficiency,” Colson adds.

Eventually, 150 to 200 people at FASFC could be directly or indirectly involved in GIS—especially if spatial analysis expands to include animal health or food chain monitoring (e.g., tracking animal diseases or the impact of environmental contamination).

This project, which won a 2025 SAG Award, signals a shift in scale for FASFC. By equipping its agents with the right digital tools, Belgium’s federal agency is building a modern, responsive, and interoperable control policy—one grounded in field experience that could inspire public institutions in Belgium and beyond facing similar territorial surveillance and health safety challenges.