Planning your Stand Count before heading to the field is crucial to successful operations and collecting data efficiently and effectively throughout the season.
Note: Stand Count missions should be conducted with flight plans requiring only a single battery at a time. If you're flying a vast area, look at breaking your flights down into sections instead of flying everything at once using multiple batteries.
Where do I start?
Knowing how many acres/hectares you will be flying and capturing is essential for planning and estimating how you will structure single-battery flights. Ask your client ahead of time to define the area in which you will be capturing data and identify any hazards or concerns.
Once you have determined your location and have a general idea of the size and desired data your customer needs, you can plan flights and prepare to fly in this area.
Performing an accurate stand assessment starts with great data collection via a flight plan from DroneDeploy. You will find an autonomous flight mode named "Stand Count" within your Project on the Fly tab for supported accounts. Select this to continue.
Once you've created a Stand Count flight plan, you will see several options to tune your flight before takeoff. You may do this from the web or the mobile app. Your flight plan will sync between your supported devices.
Defining Flight Geometry:
- By dragging the white lines and tapping on the "+" symbols, you may outline the field you would like to capture
- Each green dot reflects where an image will be taken. You may modify green dot positions using the sidebar's 'Area per Image' control.
Noteworthy Options Include:
- Crop Type - Select Corn or Soy
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Crop Attributes:
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Gap Threshold: For the majority of the time, 12 will work. Populations <26K and >40K will need to
be modified. Measure the distance between three plants to estimate the setting for
these fields. (move the slider or type in the box)
Row Spacing: Set row spacing of the field (move the slider or type in the box)
Row Ratio Analysis (M/F): Enter ratio as needed to discount any male plants in the Stand
Count
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- Area per Image - Select how frequently an image should be taken, determining how densely you'll sample your field.
- Travel Altitude - Select a higher altitude used to commute to the start of the capture area before reducing altitude.
- Capture Altitude - The altitude at the time of image capture. The blue icon controls Terrain Awareness functionality and contours the terrain for a steady above ground level (AGL) throughout the flight. We recommend that you review the terrain data before every flight. Please take a look at the chart for more information.
- Airspace & LAANC - A built-in way to secure LAANC approvals if needed. For more information, check out this article.
Crop Attributes:
- Gap Threshold - The maximum allowed spacing between plants before a gap is flagged.
- Row Spacing - The expected distance between rows.
- Row Ratio Analysis - The pattern for Male / Female rows using Stand Assessment on a seed production field.
Offline Flight:
If you know you need to fly offline, go to Advanced settings and select "Make Available Offline" to download the map tiles for offline use
You are ready to fly once you are happy with your flight plan.
After capturing offline, connect to the internet to upload the offline data. Refrain from signing out between capture and upload, or you may lose data.
General Notes & Best Practices
- Capturing around 50 photos or less is ideal. DJI limits us to 99 waypoints (photos) per flight.
- Online flight is required for Terrain Awareness to be enabled.
- The green dot indicates where an image will be taken
- The flight boundary area doesn't have to be the same as the field boundary to avoid capturing images in headland areas
- The green line is the drone path, which may be outside the white flight boundary you create
- Click the back arrow on the bottom right of the screen to undo the last boundary edit
- Make sure all other apps are closed when using DroneDeploy
- Circular fields are not supported for Stand Count as the crops have to be planted in straight rows.
- Plan to fly aligned and in the same direction that the planted rows, not crossing.