Get started with the Plant Health layers on DroneDeploy!
Plant Health is a tool specifically targeted towards our agriculture customers to help explore the health of your crop data.
Who can access Plant Health?
Visualizing Plant Health
Adjusting how the plant health layer is visualized will highlight specific areas within your field to help locate patches of healthy and unhealthy plants. Changing the visualization will modify the contrast in plant health depending on your identified threshold. In general, red relates to unhealthy plants, green relates to healthy plants, and yellow relates to moderately healthy plants.
To get started, select make sure you are on the 2D Map View, then click on the Plant Health button on the left-hand side panel on the Explore page. Once you click "Plant Health" the panel will show a histogram.
Plant Health highlighted in red.
In opening the Plant Health toolbar, the panel on the left side becomes populated with an adjustable histogram and other plant health options.
Click on the histogram to explore the plant health toolbox. Adjust the plant health visualization using the sliding bar.
Under Filter Type, you can select the band order based on the bands captured with your camera type. Each option refers to a captured bands, where R= Red, B= Blue, G= Green, and N= NIR. For standard RGB cameras, selecting RGB is the only appropriate option. For cameras that capture NIR bands, you can select from the given range of filter types.
Choose a Filter Type.
You can also select a different spectral indices under Algorithm by clicking the dropdown menu. Similar to Filter Types, you can select the algorithm appropriate for your camera type. VARI (the recommended algorithm) is the only appropriate option for standard RGB cameras. NDVI algorithm options are only appropriate if your data was captured with a multispectral camera or a camera that captures NIR bands.
Select an appropriate algorithm to process your data.
Grid and Zone Management
The Grid and Zone tool under Plant Health allows you to create specified management zones from your Plant Health maps. The Grid option geographically groups the plant health map into larger pixels to to help manage the areas with poor plant health that may require more attention. The Zone option groups the health of the plants by distinguishing areas in three contrasting visual categories, and can be tailored to suit specific thresholds you set in the histogram. More details are found in our Zone management article.
Plant health map with the Grid option enabled.
Opacity
The opacity tools changes the transparency of your Plant Health Layer to allow you to view your plants or other objects within your map.
Change the opacity with the slider bar, or type in the percentage in the text box.