Agriculture & Forestry
There are about 1.6 billion hectares of cropland on Earth and about 30% of the world’s forests are designated for timber production. We rely on these landscapes for food, fiber, and economic development, but efficient management requires good data and lots of it. Because radar sensors can penetrate cloud cover, vegetation, and soil, land managers can rely on consistent radar data regardless of the weather and day or night. Three-dimensional measurements provide unparalleled insight into working lands, providing detailed and frequent data over time to enable precision management.
Agriculture
Farming is a capital-intensive sector with sometimes unpredictable yields and revenues. Individual farmers’ yields and revenue are highly dependent on environmental variables that must be continually monitored and managed, in addition to their vulnerability to factors like droughts, floods, and pest outbreaks. Agricultural land management that maximizes efficiency of inputs (irrigation, nutrients, pesticides) while maximizing yields benefits both farmers and fields.
Remote sensing in agriculture can be used for multiple purposes, from land use mapping and planning, to monitoring environmental variables, to optimizing crop growth and yield, to monitoring outputs from interventions designed to improve plant and soil health, maximize carbon storage, or minimize nutrient inputs.
Forestry
Working forests supply building materials, furniture, and paper products and well-managed forests are both a renewable resource and can provide valuable ecosystem services as well as economic development. Remote sensing is an important tool in forest inventory and monitoring. 3D mapping is a valuable tool for use in working forests to assess forest biomass and growth, forest health, plan and implement fire and pest management, assess and plan sustainable harvest.
GeoOptics’ new 3D SAR Earth observation data products will provide users with high-resolution, precise, and frequent measurements of the earth’s vegetation without the limitations of optical data and at a fraction of the cost of current technologies. These capabilities can provide land managers with timely data to support land use planning, management actions, and disaster preparedness and recovery.
Managed landscapes also have tremendous potential as global carbon sinks and as important contributors to other ecosystem services. Financing to support sustainable management of working lands through mechanisms like carbon credits and carbon footprinting to satisfy market demand for sustainable products require precise and transparent data. GeoOptics can provide highly accurate and frequent biomass measurement and carbon estimation data to help meet the most rigorous standards of carbon markets.