ViGIS (Vegetation Index Geographic Information System) is a satellite-based agricultural field support and monitoring platform for the entire lifecycle of different crops, customized for the needs of Corteva Agriscience (Pioneer Hi-Bred Italy) technicians and customers, developed since 2016 and under continuous development. ViGIS allows agronomists and farmers to assess crop growth and identify any critical issues, such as areas under increased stress that need priority intervention.
ViGIS is a downstream service platform of the European Union’s Earth observation and monitoring program called Copernicus that uses information from a constellation of dedicated satellites, called “Sentinels,” and dozens of other satellites, so-called “participating missions.” ViGIS in particular uses data from the Sentinel-2 mission consisting of a pair of Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B satellites.
In fact, among the functionalities of ViGIS we find the mapping of spectral indices aimed at studying the health status of crops and cultivated fields, making it possible to highlight any punctual criticalities and facilitate the intervention of agronomists on site. A spectral index is a combination of two or more spectral bands. Each spectral band contains reflectance information referring to a specific wavelength range of the electromagnetic spectrum for each pixel in the image.
Product functionality
Each ViGIS user, once defined their own fields of expertise, will be able to view vegetative vigour maps (based on different vegetation indices: NDVI, NDWI, etc.) related to historical conditions as well, by changing the reference orbital cycle. These maps also can be queried by the user to know the trend of the index at each individual point throughout the growing season. With respect to these maps, reports are also available showing statistics for each orbital cycle available over the specified time interval. Below is an example of displaying the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) on a system user’s fields.
In addition, ViGIS provides the possibility of defining other spectral indices in addition to NDVI, with the ability to query each pixel that makes up the drawn field, displaying its historical series.
The system automatically updates itself by downloading and processing any new images available from the Copernicus portal each day that meet the defined cloudiness requirements.
In addition to spectral indices, with Vigis it is possible:
- Use soil test data to draw up manure plans that consider soil endowments, crop removals, and the quantity and quality of livestock manure distributed on plots. The manure recommendation can be exported to the format useful for variable rate manure distribution;
- Draw up hybrid-specific maps for maize planting; this type of advice can also be exported in digital format for variable rate planting;
- Set up the sampling grids, identifying the locations where to go for soil samples;
- Consult the results of soil analysis;
- Visualization, querying and evaluation of yield and electrical conductivity maps of agricultural fields.
