## 1 Introduction  
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) plays a crucial role in aligning agricultural practices with environmental and climate legislation [1; 2]. As part of the CAP strategic plans, each EU country is required to demonstrate a higher level of ambition in terms of environmental and climate action compared to previous periods [3]. This commitment ensures that there is no regression or \"backsliding\" when it comes to environmental and climate efforts [4]. Soil preparation operations, such as tillage, can have significant effects on both the soil and the environment [5; 6]. Soil tillage involves the mechanical manipulation of the soil, including plowing and cultivating the soil layers. While soil tillage has historically been employed for various agricultural purposes, such as weed control, seedbed preparation, and the incorporation of organic matter, its impacts on soil and the surrounding environment should be carefully considered [5; 7; 8]. Soil tillage can result in increased soil erosion, as the disruption of the soil structure makes it more susceptible to water and wind erosion [5; 8]. This can lead to the loss of topsoil, which is rich in organic matter and essential nutrients for plant growth. Additionally, soil tillage can disrupt soil aggregates, leading to a breakdown in the soil structure and a reduced water infiltration capacity [9; 10]. This can exacerbate the adverse effects of water runoff, nutrient leaching, and compaction [11], which can ultimately impact crop productivity [12; 13]. The disturbance caused by soil tillage accelerates the decomposition of organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide (CO\({}_{2}\)) into the atmosphere [5; 6]. These issues are particularly important for Portugal because the country faces a unique combination of climatic, soil, and land use challenges that significantly increase its susceptibility to desertification and water scarcity. The availability of Copernicus Sentinel data, offering systematic and high-resolution coverage over large agricultural areas, presents new opportunities to detect soil tillage practices. Satellite-based sensors, e.g., Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and optical sensors, like those on the Copernicus Sentinel satellites [14; 15], can provide data on land surface changes and vegetation dynamics. SAR imagery, particularly from Sentinel-1, has proven effective in detecting soil roughness changes associated with deep folowing due to its sensitivity to the surface texture. Backscatter models effectively capture the general trends of radar responses based on these parameters and sensor characteristics such as the frequency, incidence, and polarization. However, the operational applicability of inversion schemes remains challenging due to the complex nature of land surfaces and the difficulty in estimating appropriate roughness parameters. Additionally, decoupling the relative impacts of the surface roughness, topsoil moisture, and vegetation canopies can be a complex task. Sentinel-2 imagery offers multiple spectral bands, including the visible near-infrared (VNIR), shortwave infrared (SVIR), and red edge wavelengths. These bands are particularly useful for calculating vegetation indices (VIs), which are essential for monitoring crop health, detecting soil tillage, and assessing vegetation cover [16; 17; 18]. In particular, the red edge spectral bands enhance the ability to map vegetation characteristics, improving the accuracy of crop residue cover mapping and supporting applications in agricultural monitoring and yield estimation. Various techniques have been developed to discriminate different soil tillage types [19; 20; 21; 22]. Most of them tend to focus on the remote sensing-based identification and mapping of tillage practices, specifically aiming at the identification of the types of tillage practice rather than detecting when and where tillage occurred. For instance, previous studies have successfully mapped tillage practices in specific regions, namely in the US, distinguishing between low- and high-intensity tillage [22; 23].