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I love it when a plan comes together….

Anonym

In the last few weeks, I’ve been working with a lot of precision agriculture data of ALL kinds. No one project is the same and if I reveal anything about them, well, I’d have to kill you. Except for one. Our Airbus DS co-marketing activities, those I can discuss. I recently delivered a webinar on using Pleiades imagery in our ENVI Toolkit for Precision agriculture. The webinar focused on plant counting and using USDA Cropland data layers to find fields of interest. Sky Rubin at Airbus Co presented as well, and we’ll be showing demos of this at the ESRI UC so be sure to find us (or we’ll find you).

Anyway, when I first got my hands on the plant counter it was an earlier version and I, being new to it, was perhaps not keying in the best parameters as seen below. But I was still getting 95% accuracy on a grape vineyard. The plant centers aren’t quite perfect, but still decent to get a count.

Enter the new and improved 1.0 version—I dare you to find a missed plant. Austin Coates, one of our consultants and Plant Finder auteur, tightened up a few things to get these results.

Then Zach Norman, Sales engineer extraordinaire, asked what if I could pull an average vegetation index value. Drops mic.

When you do things like this and people see your work, you realize the value of being in a collaborative environment—you can feed off of each, motivate each other to ask questions, and find different ways of doing things. Here we go from ok counts, to better counts, to water/fertilize/do something to that grape plant right now! In boutique crops like viticulture where the value of each plant is so high, a look like this can be incredible useful for plant monitoring. For a lower value crop like corn, more regional information is fine and useful because management occurs more from the field level than the plant.

And the ENVI Toolkit for Precision Agriculture is available. It’s a library that runs with ENVI+IDL or ENVI Services Engine. Cost is $3,500. You can use it yourself or our Custom Solutions team can integrate it into your existing cloud or ArcGIS for Server environment. Drop me a line with questions.

Follow me @asoconnor