One new digital tool, the Sentinel GreenReport Plus, is revolutionizing the way we monitor agriculture across the United States. A group of scientists and engineers—Chen Liang, Jude Kastens, Xingong Li, Dana Peterson, and Abinash Silwal—created this powerful new platform. It is a timely promise of deep, satellite-based assessments of crop health, which will help farmers and agricultural researchers draw important conclusions.
The Sentinel GreenReport Plus has already made a profound impact on some of the most pressing agricultural challenges. It helps farmers monitor crop health, measure the impact of a drought on crops, spot changes in land use, and monitor vegetation regrowth following a fire or flood. This all-in-one tool uses cutting-edge remote sensing technology to provide data in real-time that is essential to gaining visibility into crop health.
Dana Peterson, director of KansasView, pointed to some of the tool’s most exciting features. She is a senior research associate with Kansas Applied Remote Sensing, a nonprofit. We’ve field-checked some of the burns and wildfires, she said. Peterson walked us through how the Sentinel GreenReport Plus can give us detailed information about the extent and severity of damage to vegetation.
Abinash Silwal is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. As the tech lead on the project, he showcased some innovative features of the platform. One of the main features of the tool is its Difference Maps, which compare Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data over several time periods. Difference Map 1 contrasts NDVI with the preceding composite period of the same calendar year, whereas Difference Map 2 compares it against the same period from last year. Difference Map 3 compares current NDVI to the average from previous years.
“The addition of the precipitation curve is the coolest thing,” said Silwal.
Incorporating the precipitation curve makes this tool even more powerful, enabling users to determine whether drought is directly affecting vegetation health. Silwal elaborated on this feature: “If I see that vegetation health is below normal and the precipitation curve is flat or shows significantly lower rainfall compared to the 30-year historical statistics, we can infer that drought may be contributing to the stress.”
Now the platform provides users with the capability to explore and analyze crop health with pixel-level precision. Watts explained that farmers are able to choose individual crops within the app so that they can track what is most relevant to their fields. “For example, if I want to monitor my field of corn, I can select ‘corn’ in the app and draw a rectangle or polygon around the area,” he explained. The tool features eleven different charts. These charts offer powerful time series and comparison data that show just how poorly today’s vegetation health measures up against historical averages.
“When the vegetation line is declining and the accumulated precipitation trend remains flat or below average, it points to possible drought conditions affecting crop health,” Silwal added.
Currently, Jude Kastens is both a research associate professor and the director of KARS. He partnered with Xingong Li, a professor of geography and atmospheric science, to enhance the tool’s functionality with their expertise. The tripartite collaboration is a strong testament to the Federal commitment to promote agricultural monitoring efficiencies leveraging emerging technologies.