To legally fly a drone in Canada (that has a take off weight of 250g or more) ‘anywhere’ in the open air, the drone operator MUST have the following documentation in place (as an absolute minimum)…

• A valid Pilot Certificate for RPAS operations (appropriate for the airspace and location)
• A certificate of RPAS Registration (with the number clearly visible on the drone)
• Established procedures for pre-flight, take-off, launch, approach, landing and recovery
• Emergency procedures in place, with respect to…
  • (i) a control station failure
  • (ii) an equipment failure
  • (iii) a failure of the remotely piloted aircraft
  • (iv) a loss of the command and control (C2) link
  • (v) a fly-away
  • (vi) a flight termination
• A detailed Site Survey
• A copy of the RPAS Operation Manual
• A maintenance record for the RPAS

If a drone operator does not have ALL of these documents/procedures in place, then they are NOT operating legally, or in accordance with the Canadian Aviation Regulations for ‘Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems’.

Additional rules for ALL drones (of any size and weight) can be found here…

A ‘Vegetation Index’ is a measurement of plant health that uses the ‘Near Infrared’ and the ‘Visible Light’ spectrums to detect a plants health and stresses, long before it can be seen by the naked eye (by which time irrecoverable damage to the plant may have occurred!). Ground moisture, field irrigation, weed counts, crop disease, Nitrogen levels and soil conditions can all be quickly analyzed with professionally collected vegetation indices data.

There are many indices that are used in plant analysis, NDVI, NDRE, GNDVI, OSAVI, GVI, PVI etc., and understanding what spectral measurements are required for a particular crop, at a specific time of the growth cycle (and in what light conditions and altitudes), is essential for the collection of accurate and reliable data for the farmer to make the right pro-active decisions for their crop management.

The data export is compatible with existing agriculture data analytic tools including the John Deere Operations Center, APEX, SST, SMS, FarmWorks, Encirca, FieldView + moren Export Map Projections – Web Mercator EPSG:3857 (WGS84); EPSG:4326 (WGS84); 2D Orthomosaic – RGB Image .tif (GeoTIFF); .kml (Web Mercator). Plant Health Mapping (NDVI) – RGB Image; .tif or .kml; Surface Modelling – .tif; .kml; .shp; .dxfn3D Point Cloud – .las; .obj surface (with .jpg); .xyzn. For a more detailed list of file types and data analysis services, please contact us.

How long a drone can fly for depends on the type of drone and its payload weight, but we can typically expect a flight time of 20 to 30 minutes. We carry sufficient spare batteries to conduct several flights in one day and always have mobile charging systems for each drone on location.

RGB/NIR aerial data should ideally be collected regularly throughout the growing season, in order to fully understand the growth cycle and stresses of your crops. However, if you feel your crops and field irrigation is generally good, then we recommend a minimum of six datasets over the course of the growth cycle. This will give you some overall data to reference in the future, and may highlight some areas of concern that you may wish to follow up with when ground truthing the field.

To collect NDVI data and multispectral data reliably, depends on environmental conditions such as sun angles etc.. Additionally, the wind speed, air temperature, field elevation and surrounding obstacles will determine the type of drone and gimbal payload we need to use at the location.

Note: The data collection requests are scheduled on a ‘first come first serve’ basis, and we endeavour to accommodate your request as close to the requested date as possible.

Yes you can. However, you will need to follow the same processes and procedures that we do (and use the same equipment), before you can expect the same quality and consistency with the results using an NDVI sensor. This is what we do best, leaving you to do what you do best.