Planet’s Crop Biomass for Agriculture Monitoring and Yield Forecasting

Contributors: Pierre Guillevic, Benjamin Aouizerats & Ariel Zajdband

Due to agricultural intensification and a changing and highly variable climate, the main environmental challenge for agriculture is to optimize the use of existing resources and ensure efficient and sustainable agricultural practices. Farming systems are dynamic, and environmental and management events like animal grazing, water shortages and irrigation, pests and diseases, or fertilization can cause rapid change in crop biomass.

Released in May 2023, Planet’s Crop Biomass Planetary Variable (PV) offers a timely and analysis-ready relative measure of the above-ground crop biomass at 10 meter spatial resolution. Within individual fields, each pixel value varies between 0 (low biomass) and 1 (high biomass). Based on microwave observations from the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-1 satellites and optical imagery from PlanetScope and Sentinel-2, Crop Biomass is a cloud-free vegetation monitoring product. Provided daily, it offers near real time data with a latency lower than 12 hours for continuous operational management and risk mitigation. Currently, Crop Biomass can provide both a proxy for the monitoring of the growth of fresh biomass as well as an accurate yield assessment early in the season at scales varying from the individual field to the agricultural region.

Crop fresh biomass monitoring

In partnership with academic institutions and the private sector, Crop Biomass has been validated against ground-based measurements for the major crops grown over the world, including wheat, corn, and soybean. Highly sensitive to the vegetation water content, Crop Biomass can be used to monitor crop fresh biomass and growth in near real time through the crop season and indicate deviations from normal conditions, such as the effects of water stress on crop growth and production.

Time series of Crop Biomass PV and ground-based fresh biomass of the different components of an irrigated corn field, i.e., whole plant, leaves, stems and grains, near Mead, Nebraska.

Based on field validation datasets representative of various agricultural systems and climates, Crop Biomass explains around 90% of the variance of the in-season crop fresh biomass.

Relationships between Crop Biomass PV and ground-based fresh biomass for irrigated and rainfed corn fields near Mead, Nebraska. Correlations coefficients and relative Median Absolute Error (rMAE) are calculated depending on water management.

Crop yield forecasting

Correlations observed between Crop Biomass and crop yield are around 80% and relative errors lower than 15% for corn and 19% for wheat and soybean fields. Crop Biomass can assess crop yields early in the season and up to 10 weeks before harvest for corn, 6 weeks for soybean and 3 weeks for wheat, when crop growth may still improve in response to curative actions such as fertilization or irrigation.

Relationships between Crop Biomass-based yield indicator and crop yield of corn, soybean and wheat fields located in Nebraska and Michigan. The Crop Biomass-based yield indicator represents the mean value of Crop Biomass between two cumulative Growing Degree Day (GDD) values representative of different crop phenological stages. The R2 and relative MAE values are based on exponential regression models.

Provided at 10 meter spatial resolution, Crop Biomass allows for anomaly detection within a single field as well as for agricultural benchmarking and comparisons between fields. In Michigan, Crop Biomass was used to assess the different yield levels associated with various management treatments.

Maps of crop yield measured in situ at Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan (bottom row) and derived from the Crop Biomass using a linear regression model (top row). Three different crops associated with a wide range of agricultural practices including conventional and organic certified treatments are represented: wheat (2019 and 2020), corn (2020) and soybean (2021).

Crop Biomass is delivered through Planet’s subscription API, with the option for users to import the data directly into Planet Insights Platform. To learn how to get started with Crop Biomass, visit our webpage.