
Open California: an archive of free high-quality satellite imagery - danso
https://www.planet.com/open-california
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jonah
Not terribly high-resolution, still nice to have a free source.

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dbcurtis
That is an understatement. Google maps satellite images are much, much higher
resolution.

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foota
I could be mistaken, but I believe some of the higher res imagery is from
airplanes.

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bahro
Yep, Planet Labs uses tiny satellites. Their resolution advantage is temporal,
not spatial.

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pinot
How will this be useful for a landuser such as myself (farmer, back-country
wanderer) who doesn't know how to do a lot of coding, or have a github
account?

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chris11
I've taken a few GIS classes, and there are some cool things you can do with
satellite imagery. You can use remote sensing to check up on crop health and
growth. I did a small school project why I estimated the percentage of trees
killed by pine beetles.

I'd do some research into QGIS, remote sensing, and NDVI if you are
interested. You would want multi-spectral imagery from a satellite with Near
Infrared sensors, and RapidEye has them.

That said, this is technical. It might be easier if you were comfortable
enough with coding to get the imagery from their developer API. And GIS/remote
sensing analysis is somewhat complicated. Plus, remote sensing doesn't analyze
anything really, it just filters information. So you would have to be
comfortable with the farm, the theory behind remote sensing, and the process
in order to correctly interpret the data. I'm not familiar enough with
agriculture to get really specific information from satellite imagery. So you
might be putting a decent amount of work into get info you could just have
gotten by walking out into your field.

Edit: there's a lot more uses like mattzero mentioned if you are using it for
more than just farming. For instance, if you hunt or fish you can use
satellite imagery to determine where specific ecosystems begin and end. So
there is a lot you can do.

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BHSPitMonkey
This will be nice to have available in the OpenStreetMap editors. <strike>A
little old, but better than nothing.</strike>

Edit: Not old at all, it seems!

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danielvf
A little old? It's supposed to have only a two week delay between the
satellite taking the photo and it appearing in the free API. Am I missing
something?

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BHSPitMonkey
Oops! I read the FAQ a little carelessly and thought only the 2013 images were
available. Much more useful than I originally took it for in that case.

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toomuchtodo
Is someone from OSM working on incorporating this into the OSM editor?

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bhousel
At around 5m/px, the imagery from planet labs doesn't currently have high
enough resolution for it to be useful for tracing in OSM. It looks good only
down to around z14ish.

But what they're doing is still really interesting. Their stated goal is to be
able to image every part of the planet daily by the end of 2016. And it's
possible in theory to process multiple passes of lower resolution imagery into
a composite imagery layer with a higher effective resolution. So it wouldn't
surprise me if they use their microsatellite approach to push into markets
that are currently served only by hi-res imagery providers like Digital Globe
(imagery from expensive satellites) and Pictometry (imagery from airplanes).

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mapmap
Can this be used to build a commercial project or does the CC-BY-SA 4.0
license require it to be free and open source?

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BHSPitMonkey
Non-commercial Creative Commons licenses will have "-NC" in the name.

