After having won the overall JK Barrie APSEA award last week, NGIS have just released a farming GIS tool that they believe is set to revolutionise agricultural practices the world over. Green Precision is a free platform that provides satellite derived data for any farm in the world.
For the first time farmers across Australia and the entire world can view vegetation health and crop variability for any location in a free and easy to use web platform. Backed by the advantages of cloud computing and a massive archive of satellite imagery, users are able to compare vegetation for any location across multiple years to track variability and view changes in vegetation through an analysis of normalised difference vegetation index (NVDI). By using the tool to understand the variability of crop or pasture growth within paddocks and farms and across seasons, growers will be able to make better decisions about their farming practices.
While the same satellite data has been available for a number years, not until now have the computing capabilities been available to perform analysis on a global scale. Green Precision uses both Landsat 8 and Landsat 7 data with 30m resolution, with the maximum NDVI value for any location being taken as the monthly value. The result is a reliable picture of what the peak vegetation value was for any location over the course of a month.
While most farmers will be aware that they have can monitor variability in health and productivity through NDVI data, many of them would not have had the access to this type of application before.
Nathan Eaton, Principal Consultant of NGIS says that this scale of information has never been readily accessible before: “…certainly not in a way where users can graph vegetation statistics for any location across multiple years, and certainly not in a free and easy to use website like we have done with Green Precision.”
“When the user clicks on a location we are processing worldwide Landsat mosaics and pulling data from petabytes of imagery to graph the specific NDVI values for a specific location over the last 4 years.”
“The actual computation required is enormous… This job would not have been done without cloud computing.”
NGIS used Google Earth Engine to provide access and analysis to huge catalogues of satellite imagery.
Asked if NGIS will be including predictive analysis, Eaton’s answer implies there is no limit for NGIS: “Predictive analysis is something we are looking at for other applications along with a range of other features that provide answers and insights.”
“Green Precision is an easy to use, freely available entry level application and we are really interested to see how much value users get from the site.”
