Real Time Agricultural Monitoring with the Planet SmallSat Constellation
Abstract
Planet—an aerospace and data analytics company (www.planet.com)—now operates 190 earth observation satellites, collecting approximately 85% of the land-surface of the Earth every day in multispectral, 3.7m-resolution imagery. This frequency and spatial resolution provides for unique monitoring of global agriculture, especially billions of smallholder farms that feed much of the world. Through our Education and Research Program, anyone at a university is eligible to access a portion of Planet data to power their research at no cost. Here, we present innovative results from our research partners. Most critically, several users have undertaken the development of models for regularizing spectrally disparate data feeds from Planet, Sentinel and Landsat; these approaches have generated standardized, 3.7m-resolution, daily data feeds for NDVI, LAI and (in combination with eddy covariance data) crop water use. The key breakthrough is interoperability: ingesting multiple, disparate satellite information fields for the generation of actionable agricultural indicators. This foundational methodology, aided by computer vision, can provide near real-time updates on the yield, health and welfare of smallholder farms. Storms, drought and disease can be detected faster than ever before, enabling smart intervention and enhancing the effectiveness of insurance and disaster relief mechanisms.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.B43K..02M
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0430 Computational methods and data processing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0434 Data sets;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES