How Can Technology Keep Crops Safe?

For the past few month, drought has swept across the western region of the United States. More than 90 percent of the seven western states are in drought conditions, and around 59% of the regions are extremely or unnaturally dry. Plants and vegetation are in poor health condition in the affected areas with high temperature, low precipitation, and low soil moisture.

Drought does not only bring a food safety concern, but also a national financial security issue. Therefore, there is a growing demand for information regarding agricultural drought and other plantation all over the world.

Scientists at NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have developed a set of tools that can help the government learn about food safety, such as Vegetation Health Index, or VHI, which uses JPSS program’s VIIRS instrument to show health of crops with color-coded maps.

Above is the VHI of western regions of the United States in July 22, 2021. Regions with green and blue color represents healthy and lush crop growth, and ones with red represents dry and sparse areas.

TerraQuanta provides high efficiency solutions for crop monitoring under the collaboration between sample collection and algorithm development. By using high-resolution image and example segmentation model, we can extract the quantity and area of cultivated land. At the same time, by integrating crop monitoring data, crop distribution data at the plot level can also be obtained to achieve "plot level" crop planting management.

On the basis of block segmentation and crop condition monitoring, we can also achieve emergency monitoring and data analysis of crop losses caused by disasters such as flood, frost, drought, for crops in the monitoring area. We are also able to quick obtain the affected area and the spatial distribution of the crop information, providing scientific spatiotemporal data support for the government's disaster prevention and mitigation and agriculture insurance assessment and claims.