Sao Paulo – Spot Image and Infoterra, affiliates of EADS Astrium, announced the launch in Brazil of SPOTCana. This is a new service tailored to monitoring sugar cane plantations, a crop that is being grown increasingly in the country, notably in the State of Sao Paulo where it used to produce ethanol.
Spot Image, with support from Infoterra, is now proposing an online subscription service to give the sugar industry—cane growers, distilleries, environmental departments and insurance companies—precise, ready-to-use maps throughout the growth cycle. Subscribers can thus acquire information to closely monitor their crops, precisely ascertain growth, maturity and stress for timely decision-making, and manage their priorities.
SPOTCana provides information on crop maturity derived from high-resolution satellite imagery. This information is delivered at key stages of the growth cycle to support estimation of available biomass and detection of yield disparities between fields.
Subscribers are alerted each time new data are available for their region of interest. Each delivery comprises a satellite image and two vegetation maps:
• a green vegetation map showing crop density, an indicator of healthy growth;
• a dry vegetation map pinpointing crop problems and indicating the degree of maturity at the end of the growth cycle.
A link on the portal is provided to retrieve data and view them in Google Earth. Following in the footsteps of the Farmstar online crop monitoring service for cereal growers, SPOTCana confirms the utility of remote-sensing services for agriculture and the know-how and innovative solutions developed by Spot Image and Infoterra in this area.
Conclusive tests
A preliminary experiment was conducted in 2008 for a test zone in the State of Sao Paulo. Because sugar cane quality is affected if the crop has to be transported more than 20 kilometres to the distillery, initial efforts focussed on mapping fields around production facilities in order to define how many satellites images would be needed to cover all zones to be analysed.
Tasked SPOT imagery was therefore acquired at four stages in the sugar cane’s growth cycle. Spot Image automatically orthorectified images and applied a regular grid to them, then Infoterra processed the images to calculate biophysical parameters indicative of plant water stress, chlorophyll activity and other factors.
Following the success of this experiment, all growers in the State of Sao Paulo can now subscribe to the service through a dedicated Web portal.
