Agricultural Monitoring with Planet Data

The unprecedented combination of high spatial (3-5m) and temporal frequency (1-3 days) offered by Planet data are ideal for observing smallholder farms. Over the last couple of years, the quality of the data improved in many ways but using this data for scientific analysis remains an uphill task due to several reasons, including data access, management, and processing. In this webinar, I will share the experience of processing thousands of Planet tiles to map crop types over large areas. More specifically, I will focus on the following topics: i) understanding Planet Instruments and data catalog, ii) use Planet API to search data, iii) create a pipeline to download and ingest the data as Google Earth Engine asset and iv) process the data in Earth Engine for various agricultural applications including crop type mapping. In addition, I will discuss cloud cover and misregistration issues, and challenges with calibration between different sensors in the Planetscope family.