How a Terravect survey works

Who flies it

During the beta, Terravect arranges the flying. A qualified pilot, operating under UK drone regulations, flies a multispectral sensor over your land on a date agreed with you. You do not need a drone, a licence, or anyone on your staff who knows how to fly one.

If you already fly your own surveys, tell us on the form. The analysis is the same whoever captured the imagery, and we would like to know what you fly and how.

What the sensor records

A normal camera records red, green and blue. A multispectral sensor records several narrow bands as well, including red edge and near-infrared, which is where stress in a plant shows first. A leaf under water stress or disease pressure changes how it reflects those bands days before it changes colour to the eye. The agronomist page explains the physics; the short version is that the survey measures a physiological signal, not a colour.

The flight is a set of overlapping passes at a fixed height, stitched into one georeferenced image of the whole area. On a typical farm block or an 18-hole course that is a morning's work, weather permitting.

What we need from you

• A boundary. The fields, pitches or holes you want surveyed. A marked-up map, a list of field names, or a walk round with the pilot all work.
• Access and a contact. Somebody on site on the day who can open a gate and answer a question.
• Timing. Multispectral readings are sensitive to sun angle, cloud and, on turf, mowing. We aim for consistent conditions between passes, so we will ask when you cut, feed and irrigate and try to fly at the same point in that cycle each time.
• Anything you already know. A patch that always struggles, a drainage line, a change of variety. It makes the findings sharper and tells us whether the models are seeing what you see.

What comes back

Every survey lands on a 3D model of your land. On it you see each finding where it was found, the reading behind it, and a plain observation with advice on what to do about it. Findings are placed against the shape of the ground, so a dry south-facing bank reads as what it is rather than as an unexplained patch.

Repeat passes are laid over the same model, so the useful comparison is available: what spread, what recovered, and whether an intervention did what it was meant to.

Your data

The imagery from your land and the findings drawn from it are held against your account and used to produce your findings. We do not sell them or pass them to third parties. Anonymised, aggregated readings help us improve the models, which is part of what a beta is for; if you would rather your data were not used that way, say so and it will not be.

Exports and other systems

Beta partners tend to have somewhere the findings need to go: a farm management platform, a GIS, an irrigation controller, a contractor's inbox. Tell us on the form what you would need to connect to. What partners actually plug into is one of the things the beta exists to find out.