REMOTE SENSING IN TASMANIA              [home]   [topic page]

Agriculture is increasingly looking at remote sensing to monitor the health and productivity of crops throughout the State. The School of Agricultural Science has been running several programs with the help of the University Central Science Laboratory expertise to analyse satellite imagery over an extended time. At present, images are correlated with the current state of the crop on the ground in order to build a reliable data base for the reliable interpretation of imagery.

Private companies are also present from which information can be bought about individual fields.

The images from satellites also provide information about soils and moisture content of the soil. Poppies require a constant water supply so these details are important.

What is remote sensing? (ref1; ref2 )

The study of radiation from an area in both visible and invisible parts of the spectrum from above by aircraft, balloon or satellite.

This animation has been prepared from a series of zoomed images on a paddock near Devonport ( top right ).

Colouring is "false" as the images were taken in the infrared. These are from a Landsat photo courtesy of Rachel Barrett of the School of Agricultural Science.

Remote sensing can be both "active" or "passive".

• Active sensing happens when the vehicle - satellite or aircraft uses radar or light to illuminate the region and looks at the reflected radiation.

• Passive sensing merely observes the radiation coming from the region by measuring the intensity at various wavelengths..

Most of the current work in the state for crop studies uses passive sensing - Landsat 7 and SPOT images which can be purchased from the US and French companies running the satellites.