Crop Change Detection

Crop Change Detection is a powerful new tool that has the ability to track the change in vegetation within fields using aerial imagery. This will allow users of this tool to easily identify areas of a field that may need attention. This is available to existing in-season imagery customers, please contact our customer success team for activation.

Setting Up Users with Crop Change Detection

Once Crop Change Detection has been activated for the organization, an administrator must give

permissions to each user. To do this begin by clicking on the menu icon in the upper right corner of the screen and selecting Administration. Within the new window, click on the drop-down menu and select User Admin. Next find the user that needs permission. Select the Advanced Permissions tab and then check the box beside Crop Change Detection Access. Click Save Changes to finish. The user now has access to Crop Change Detection.

Enrolling Fields

To be eligible for the Crop Change Detection feature, Fields must first be enrolled by an Administrator. Start by clicking on the menu icon in the upper right corner of the screen and selecting Administration. Within the new window, click on the drop-down menu and select Crop Change Detection Enrollment. Above the Grower selection box, users can set the Significant Change Threshold, this is defaulted to 5% and will dictate what percent of significant change in the field to warrant a notification. This percentage will be a setting for the entire organization.

Next, click on Select Growers and search for the Grower with fields to be enrolled. Fields under each grower are grouped into each farm. Fields must have crop areas set up for the current year with Planting Date, Harvest Date and Crop type to be eligible for Crop Change detection enrollment. Each Field can be individually selected or selected by each farm by clicking on the topmost box in the respective farm. The entire grower can be enrolled by checking the Select all fields box at the top of the window. Selecting Send Alerts will send a message to the Notification Center when the set threshold % of the field shows a significant change in the imagery, and selecting priority will prioritize the field to the top of the page in the Crop Change Detection tool. Once all the desired fields are selected, click save to finish.

Navigating the Crop Change Detection Tool

The Crop Change Detection Tool can be accessed in the Tools menu to the right of the map from the Location, Grower, Farm and Field levels of the profile tree. In this example, the Crop Change Detection tool has been accessed from the Location level, so a grower will need to be selected. Initially, fields will be organized by priority fields first, denoted by a red binocular icon, however, clicking on the filter buttons at the top of the page will sort the fields according to the filter selected. Each tile will display the boundary of the field, the percent of the field with significant change and change detection layer will be represented with purple polygons. Fields that have exceeded the set significant change threshold for the most recent event will be highlighted in red. To get a closer look at the field, Click on view data.

At the top of the Crop Change Detection Data Viewer will display each event or date range with a significant change. Each event is selectable with options to select whether Action has been taken or not on the field for the event. The Change Detected layer is the defaulted layer that is loaded for the event, in this example the map legend shows that 20% of the field showed a decrease of 1.75%, a decrease of 3.5% in 2% of the field and greater than a 3.5% decrease in 1% of the field while 64% of the total acres remained unchanged. Click on the left and right arrows to navigate through the selection of events.

The Cloudy Imagery tool tip is located above the left arrow at the top of the screen. Hovering over the Cloud icon will display a list of dates covered by the events displayed with the cloud cover % for each date.

Other map layers can also be selected from the map legend. A Vegetation index and a color image can be selected for both the beginning date and end date of the event. The Vegetation index is a measure of the image on a scale of 0-1. The Change Detection Layer measures the change in the two Vegetation index layers, and the Color image is the base of how the Vegetation index is calculated.

The check box in the bottom right corner of the map will overlay the Change Detection Layer that is displayed from the field preview from the previous window. The Change Detection Layer is represented with purple polygons and is a representation of the areas of the field with the most significant change with an area greater than 1 acre.