Sentera Provides Crop Insights with New AgVault Features

Sentera, a designer and manufacturer of remote-sensing technologies for precision agriculture, has announced new features for the NDVI Toolbox in Sentera AgVault Desktop. These tools offer agriculture professionals improved field insights for use on and off the field. New capabilities include zone management, a basic prescription-writing tool, and dynamic orthomosaic colormapping. Agronomists, advisors, and producers can use these tools to analyze crop data and streamline prescription workflows throughout the growing season.

“Sentera’s latest software enhancements help ag professionals achieve deeper crop health insights by giving them tools to create management zones based on near real-time NDVI values. Today’s updates create more space for professionals to combine Sentera-generated data with other crop health information, to develop prescriptions, and take action,” explains Kris Poulson, vice president of agriculture for Sentera. “AgVault’s latest features are intuitive, accurate, and integrate seamlessly with other precision ag tools and platforms such as the My John Deere Operations Center.”

Augmented Capabilities

AgVault’s principal updates address some of their customers’ most frequent requests. These include:

• Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) Zone Management: Transforms a high-resolution raster field map into zones that share common NDVI values, allowing users to manage their field-based on measured crop health metrics. This information can be exported directly to a shapefile for consumption in the My John Deere Operations Center or other precision agriculture applications.
• Simple Prescription Tool: AgVault’s prescription tool allows users to input application rates based on NDVI zones. Data exported from the prescription tool can be used by most leading in-cab systems to perform precision input applications.
• Colormapping of Full Orthomosaics: Orthomosaics now have the same dynamic colormapping features as other AgVault products – perfect for easily analyzing plant health data over time, across an operation, or across a field.

Closing the Gap

Through AgVault’s enhanced NDVI Toolbox algorithms, users can leverage TrueNDVI data to segment fields into zones, attach application rates, and export them to their machinery. Zones are calculated through a precise statistical analysis of TrueNDVI data, coupled with a user-defined sensitivity selection. Together, AgVault creates zones of varying size ready for rate input and export.

“Sentera’s remote-sensing technology already collects and distills precise, reliable crop health data that tells a story,” explains Reid Plumbo, director of product management for Sentera. “With the launch of zone management and the prescription tool, we close the gap between measurement and action. For those input operations that can leverage vegetative indices, AgVault now provides a complete solution.”

All Season Actions

AgVault users are able to take advantage of this technology as they go into harvest. Professionals can assess the efficacy of current inputs and compare against harvest data. Planning for the 2018 growing season is already underway in some parts of North America and analyzing historical data is important to leverage as inputs, seeds, and equipment are assessed.

AgVault’s NDVI Toolbox features and enhancements come standard with AgVault Pro and AgVault Viewer licenses.