HOW TO BEGIN A PROJECT USING SATELLITE IMAGES: THE VIABILITY STUDY (part #2)

4) Agronomic Support 

One of the fundamental aspects to contemplate in a project of this nature, specially in its initial phase, is to have an efficient support of the ground team, that provides a fluent information that facilitates the correlation between the satellite images data and the "ground truth". This support need to cover the following items: 

a) Selection of reference crops 

20/25 reference crops are selected. these cultures must fulfill the following conditions: 

- They must have a regular shape (or the most approximated possible), for example, polygons with clear delimited borders and nonadjacent with other soybean crops. 

- They must be located in a nongreater radius of 50km of the pre-established center of the study area 

- Seeded in an average date (+/- 15 days) representative of the date of sowing for the study region. 

- Its location will be determined by GPS (for example, central coordinates of the crop) 

- A simple annotation for the reference crops, for example C1, C2, C3, etc.. 

b) Pursuit of the reference cultures 

- a photographic registry 1) One month after the sowing and 2) when the crop reaches its total development. 

- When its state of development allows it, should be doing an estimation "by rough estimate" of the yield. 

- It will be written the date of the seedtime beginning, the harvest beginning, and the planted variety. 

- At the end of the harvest, it will be registered the real yield. 

- Any abnormal factor that can influence in the yield of the culture it will be written.


c) Interference with other crops 

When we access for the first time to study new area it's very important for us to investigate if other crops, that coexist with the soybean, can constitute an interference, that is to say, is necessary to verify if the satellite sensors can confuse these crops with the the soybean. Consequently, it will have to know which crops coexist with the soybean in order to make the corresponding verifications. 

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