Geospatial Data for Vegetation Monitoring

To leverage Geospatial data and technologies for monitoring and managing the planet’s green cover, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals for life on land (SDG 15) and climate action (SDG 13).

Solution

An application was developed for vegetation monitoring derives data from the Indian Remote Sensing Satellites and archives them. The data includes vegetation indices, soil moisture, temperature throughout the field, rainfall and other such parameters which are continuously archived by the application. Data from a freely available foreign satellite are also used.

The application facilitates interactive visualization and analytics on the web. The repository of multi-temporal (over 22 years) and multi-resolution (500 to 10 m) NDVI time series data is available on VEDAS (https://vedas.sac.gov.in/vegetation-monitoring/index.html).

The website provides capabilities to perform several image processing operations such as image differencing, temporal classification, Geospatial query, principal component analysis, temporal NDVI compositing and long-term statistics.

The application also supports the presentation of data such as heat maps, temporal profiles, and Year-on-Year (YoY) comparisons. Zonal statistics at the district, taluka and village levels are also supported. Furthermore, the time series of vegetation indices derived using Sentinel-2 data enables farmlevel assessment of vegetation condition and crop growth.

The project uses an in-house developed raster analysis server, an open-source image processing library, spatial RDBMS, web-GIS software, client-side GIS-based JavaScript libraries and Python.

Outcomes Achieved

The application is being

Objective

1. To enable interactive visualisation and geospatial analysis of multi-satellite, multi-sensor and multi-date EO data and data products pertaining to vegetation cover on a single platform.

2. To assist farm-level assessment of vegetation condition and crop growth using EO data.

used for providing inputs for Agro-met advisories by IMD. It complements the activities of Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC) under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare. The application has the potential to provide feedback for timely policy interventions for defining import-export policies, fixing MSP, and monitoring and evaluating irrigation programmes and canal command areas. Insurance companies can use it for claim settlement and risk assessment for crop insurance. The application can also be used for providing advisories to farmers for efficient agricultural management practices, precision agriculture, contract farming etc.