Making Sense of Remote Sensing
The use of satellite and drone imagery is taking off in a big way, especially in the agricultural sector. In this blog, I attempt to demystify some of the technical (sales) jargon and provide some practical examples that demonstrate the value of remote sensing and other geospatial technologies in agriculture and related industries.
Improving the accuracy of information extracted from drone imagery for fruit tree management
Drone imagery is frequently used to calculate vegetation indices - such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) - to...
Where did Cape Town's water go?
The study showed that, with the aid of satellite remote sensing, water use can be linked to specific land uses.
Can aerial and drone imagery be used for quantitative remote sensing?
"Be cautious of the fact that aerial and drone imagery are generally not well calibrated. Any outputs of quantitative analyses (e.g....
Automated field boundary delineation using Sentinel-2 imagery
One of my MSc students, Barry Watkins, is working on a technique to automatically extract agricultural field boundaries from Sentinel-2...
Fire monitoring
Below is a colour image captured by the Sentinel-2 satellite on 20 February 2019. The image covers an active fire near Franschhoek, South...
What resolution imagery is best for monitoring tree crops?
I am often asked about what resolution imagery is best for monitoring agricultural crops. This may seem like a simple question, but the...
How satellites can be used to prioritize farm inspections
Many farms are too large to monitor using traditional "feet-in-field" inspections. In this article I give a short overview of a remote...
Using free satellite imagery for yield benchmarking and predictions
The use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), for agricultural applications is rapidly increasing. Unfortunately, the popularity...
Imagine having such a 3D model of your farm
Remote sensing and geospatial technologies can also help with other aspects of farming. For instance, in this video a 3D model was...
Our crops are beautiful
I was playing around with some Sentinel-2 images and accidentally created this image (if you are interested in the technical stuff, see...
These are the bands that farmers should like
In an earlier article I explained that remote sensing – within the context of earth observations – is the practice of deriving...
What exactly is remote sensing?
In laymen's terms, remote sensing (RS) is the process whereby information of an object, or many objects, is collected from afar, i.e....





