June 1, 2020

New in Flurosense: on-demand high-resolution satellite imagery

Marie Marion
Agronomist and Project Manager

As mentioned in the previous post, fixed-wing aircraft or drones might not be available or cost-effective enough depending on the country you are in or the size of your farm. Note: you can order fixed-wing aircraft imagery and/or drone imagery through FluroSense in the USA, Australia, Brazil, Argentina.

That's why we see the high-resolution (< 1 m/px) satellite imagery growing in demand amongst our customers, thanks to its global availability, standardised quality and responsiveness (more on this later).

Medium and high-resolution satellite imagery

At FluroSat, driven by the desire to address our user's needs, we have now provided our customers managing orchards, vineyard, and high-value crops on drip-irrigation systems with an easy way to order high-resolution satellite imagery to access the much-needed operational insights!

High-resolution (< 1 m/px) satellite imagery is best-suited for orchards, vineyard, and high-value crops on drip-irrigation.

As a FluroSense user, you can access on-demand satellite imagery, such as

  • high-resolution imagery (RGB+NIR, <50 cm) - “tasking”, i.e. placing order for future imagery acquisition
  • medium-resolution imagery (RGB+NIR, 3m) - retrieving the image from the imagery archive.
High-resolution satellite imagery (0.5 m/px, left) allows you to see individual trees (zoom in), in medium-resolution satellite imagery (3m/px, right) you can only see blocks/larger features.

RGB imagery, shown above gives you a "bird's eye view", and RGB+NIR bands together allow us to generate NVDI/biomass index. For more details on vegetation indices, please, check out the short explanation video here.

Best uses of high-resolution imagery

1. Monitoring trials across crop types

Value of any trial is closely linked to our ability to capture and demonstrate its effect. Plot designs often have individual areas of interest much smaller than 10 m/33 ft, and hence require high-resolution imagery for monitoring. The high-resolution images can be scheduled for future acquisition at a set point in time to align with the key growth stages or operational tasks.

To make trial monitoring even simpler, you can upload your plot designs directly to FluroSense, where all plots that have the same treatment/planting parameters can be connected into a group, allowing you to monitor the average performance of the application across all the plots with the same rate at once, and easily benchmark them against each other.

Crop trial monitoring with high resolution satellite imagery
High-resolution satellite imagery allows you to quantitatively estimate the efficacy of your field trials.

2. Tree health analytics

Detection of individual trees in orchards and groves requires sub-meter high-resolution imagery, which can be ordered through FluroSense for farms anywhere in the world. Once the trees have been identified, the orchard analysis can be easily performed on an zone, block or farm level.

Raw NDVI imagery layer
"Soil free" canopy layer
Individual tree health
Tree health monitoring starts with removing the "soil noise" that will distort the tree analysis. and then applying multiple techniques of tree detection and health scoring.

What is more important, however, is being able to quickly make decisions on the tree health metrics derived from imagery, such as identifying the 10% worst performing trees in the block or benchmarking the blocks to see where there might be issues with the irrigation systems.

Finding worst/best performing trees in the orchard
Finding worst/best performing trees in the orchard with 1 click!

Ordering high-resolution satellite imagery has never been easier!

We have made it extremely easy for you to place orders for high-resolution satellite imagery. You can either do it

REQUEST A QUOTE


When placing the order, you can let us know the optimal date(s) you would like to get imagery over your fields, and you will shortly get a quote for approval!

We know that being a farmer or a crop consultant does not require you to be an imagery expert, and so you can just call on our expertise anytime! So if you are not sure, what data source is right for you, and your farm our friendly team of agronomists is just a click away and is always happy to help you assemble or pick the solution/package that makes the most sense for your agribusiness.

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