Quiet Planet

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting social distancing recommendations and related restrictions have led to numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity around the world, all of which may have impacts on our environment. Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.

Beeraha

Summary

The app intends to provide African farmers with information about the condition of their plot of land and provide recommendations as to how their land can be best put to use with certain crops.

How We Addressed This Challenge


- Our app intends to provide all information that a farmer could use to make smart decisions about his/her/their crops.

- It will provide satellite data to the farmers so they can see general indicators of the health of their crops and whether they are planting in ideal locations.

- This will be done by providing NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), UVI (Ultraviolet Index), LST (Land Surface Temperature), EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index), and soil grade, mapped to the plot of land owned by the farmer. They will be asked to mark this when using the app for the first time.

- The app will also provide information on weather conditions and forecasts.

- The app will provide recommendations on the suitability of certain crops to the plot of land. The idea for this feature came from an Indonesian study on the suitability of land in Serang for cassava growth on the basis of satellite data.

- Our app focuses on changes in local environmental conditions that might affect agriculture such as a sudden increase in temperature.

- The app can easily be installed and used on GPS-enabled smartphones making it rather easy for the farmers to access the information in it.


How We Developed This Project

Farmers in Africa have been immensely affected by recent droughts. The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 only exacerbated the problem. With restrictions on movement and a lack of buyers willing to buy exports, the continent is at a severe economic disadvantage. We thought about how we would help farmers post-pandemic. To maximize profits, they will have to use all the information at their disposal. 

We aimed to design the interface to be as simple as possible. It had to be usable by anyone. For selecting the plot of land, since the user may or may not have access to the geographical coordinates, we have set it up such that the individual can choose to move along the boundaries of their plot and it will be marked as the Area of Interest.

The addition of "Recommended crops", is so that, overall, the entire user base of the app can make economically responsible decisions. 

The languages we will be using are Java, Python, C++ and a couple of APIs.The repository links have been mentioned below. 

Tags
#ndvi #agriculture #evi #lst #soilmoisture #africa #landsat #eos #sentinel #farmers #nasa #esa #uvi #aqi
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.