Satellite show how crops grow 03 Jul 2009
On to the website, you can pick a day and one click will show you the growth map of the Netherlands for that day. Bright colours show how much carbon was stored at a particular spot that day – weather permitting of course, because the vegetation does need to be visible from space.
The Centre for geo-information’s plant growth website is an example of a dynamic web-mapping service for displaying constantly changing data on the internet. Web mapping is the latest trend in the science of remote sensing: studying planet earth from an ever- expanding army of satellites in space. ‘But until this decade most of the data was hidden away in databases and only accessible to a select group of specialists’, explains Kooistra. This is changing, and both a new science and a new market have grown up around making the data available to a broader public.
Mapping plant growth from outer space is nothing new. NASA has been doing it for years. ‘But NASA does it on a global scale and doesn’t use local sensors, so there is much less detail’, says Kooistra. His plant growth map has a resolution of 250 metres, which is as sharp as the satellites can get it.
[Source: Resource Wageningen University]
