“We’re currently in a golden age of Earth observation. The wealth of publicly available data from the Copernicus programme is a fantastic resource to monitor climate change and land use change, and to provide information at landscape scale,” comments Dr Andrew Tewkesbury, Solutions Consultant (Intelligence UK), Connected Intelligence at Airbus, a speaker in the Sofa Session of REAP 2021.
He continues: “Alongside the public missions there is an explosion of commercial low Earth orbit satellites typically providing much higher resolution information, and at a user determined frequency.
“The benefit for end-users is in the combination of all of these, with commercial low Earth orbit satellites providing the detailed information to characterise boundaries and within field details, and the public missions offering more land-scape scale observations.”
Applications for Earth observation in agriculture
He gives the example of the FieldFinder capability, where Airbus is partnering with Agrimetrics: “We are using high resolution satellite imagery (1.5m resolution) to accurately find the field boundaries, and then by combining that with Sentinel information via Crop Analytics we can find out more about that field as a whole.
“We’re in an age where there’s a huge amount of spatial data available, on weather, on soil, satellite imagery, previous cropping history, and all of it requires a spatial framework.
“FieldFinder provides automated generation of field boundaries delivering a spatial framework for other data to attach to. This will enable us to capture the changing nature of agriculture on a field basis.
“Looking to the future, we will see more and more satellites delivering sub-metre imagery.”
Andrew will be talking more about the potential applications for this technology at REAP 2021.
REAP 2021: Changing Time(s) for Agriculture – 10th November 2021
Imagine a world where agriculture is not constrained by time. The ability to manage and manipulate time is increasing and REAP 2021 will explore the advances in technology and breakthroughs in science that is making this possible.
REAP brings together people from across the agri-tech ecosystem who believe that innovation is the engine for change. The conference bridges the gap between producer needs and technology solutions and showcases exciting agri-tech start-ups.