Web service-based vegetation condition monitoring system - VegScape

Timely, frequent, high resolution, fully geospatial covered crop vegetation condition information throughout the season is critical to decision making in both public and private sectors that concern agricultural policy, production, food security, and food prices. This paper presents a new interactive Web service-based vegetation condition monitoring system - VegScape. This system automatically obtains and preprocesses near real-time 250m MODIS daily surface reflectance data for better spatial and temporal resolutions, and generates geospatially various vegetation condition indices for timely crop condition. The VegScape not only offers the online interactive map operations, data dissemination, crop condition statistics, charting and graphing, and comparison analysis, but also provides Web services such on-demand vegetation condition maps and statistics for uses in other applications. This system delivers dynamic user experiences and geospatial crop condition information for decision support with its comprehensive capabilities through standard geospatial Web services in a publicly accessible online environment.