The aims of agricultural land management change continuously, reflecting shifts in wider societal priorities. Currently, these include addressing the climate crisis, promoting environmental sustainability, and supporting the livelihoods of rural communities while ensuring food security. Working toward these aims requires information on the character of agricultural land and how dynamic processes influence it. Remote and near-surface sensing data are important sources of information on the characteristics of soils, plants, water, topography, and related processes. Sensing data are collected, analysed, and used in decision-making by specialists in multiple domains connected to land management. While progress has been made to connect the use of sensing data across agricultural and environmental applications under the umbrella of integrated sustainable land management, archaeological and heritage uses of these data remain largely disconnected. This creates barriers to accounting for the impacts of past human activities on contemporary agricultural landscapes through the alteration of soils, topography, and plant communities. In parallel, it hinders the creation of knowledge about the archaeological features which form an essential part of the heritage of agricultural landscapes. The ipaast-czo project explores the potential of a coordinated approach across all these domains, which would reduce these barriers and provide benefits by better integrating information generated using sensing. To do so, both conceptual and practical barriers to developing shared practices and how these might be overcome were considered. In this study, a conceptual framework designed to create a shared understanding of how agricultural landscapes work and enable collaboration around their management was proposed. This framework treats present-day rural agricultural landscapes as Critical Zones: complex entities shaped by long-term human–environment interactions including contemporary farming. Practitioners in precision agriculture and archaeological remote and near-surface sensing, as well as users of these data, were engaged using workshops and interviews. The relationships between practitioners’ objectives, data requirements for their applications, and their perceptions of the benefits and disadvantages of changing working practices were interrogated. The conceptual framework and assessment of practical benefits and challenges emerging from this work provide a foundation for leveraging shared sensing data and methods for long-term integrated sustainable land management.

Remote and near surface sensing data are widely used in archaeology and heritage management for feature discovery, change detection and monitoring, as an input to predictive modelling, and in the planning process. While global and regional datasets are widely used for some purposes, data are regularly acquired specifically for archaeological projects because of the very high spatial resolution required for feature detection and assessments of archaeological significance and the need for data on subsurface features. The sensing data collected for archaeology cover limited areas and only a few types of sensors, known to produce data efficiently, are regularly employed. Precision agriculture is beginning to produce large quantities of varied sensing data across extensive landscape areas. This situation creates an opportunity to adapt and reuse precision agricultural data for archaeology and heritage work, extending covering and enhancing our understanding of archaeology in contemporary agricultural landscapes. Equally, there is potential for coordinated data collection, collecting data once for multiple applications, and to add value through analyses which bring together perspectives from multiple related domains to model long-term processes in anthropogenic soil systems. This article provides a high-level overview of policy and technological developments which create the potential for sensing data reuse, coordinated data collection, and collaborative analyses across archaeological, agricultural, and agri-environmental applications while underscoring the structural barriers which, at present, constrain this potential. It highlights examples where the development of interoperable data and workflows can promote tighter integration of archaeology and cultural heritage management with sustainable agricultural land management and support integrated decision making.

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