CropSignal News

In order to make CropSignal more accessible to new users, we have added a new default Snapshot Topic that only requires a user to select one crop type and one location (World or Country) and can quickly view National or World Total USDA Supply & Use statistics (along with subnational statistics as well).  This topic allows a quick picture of what’s happening globally or nationally for a particular commodity from a supply/use perspective as well as the subnational contributions and any significant changes from the prior year/month.  It can be found under the Topics menu.

New reports from Rural Bank and Australia Oilseeds Federation are available in the Reports topic.

We have added Min/Max versions of the Area, Yield, and Production variables in the Annual Crop Stats Topic.  This was implemented to support sources (namely Brazil’s CONAB, and GDA forecasts) which provide upper and lower limits to their area and production forecasts, at least early in the year.

You can now add a second variable to the label on every location on a map.  For example, you can set the main map variable (classifier and label) as the percent change from the 5 YR Avg, but also include the Yield Harvested value in the label.  If multiple variables are available, a second dropdown is visible in the Pivot Map control bar from which you can select the second variable to include in the variable (the default is ‘None’).  You can also choose whether to include the Location name in the label or not.

New week modes that label explicit dates have been added to the Seasonal Analysis topic.  Previously, the data were listed with just week numbers (with optional years), but now an approximated date for the end of the week (e.g. ‘Apr 20’) can be selected, or the same can be presented in YYYY-MM-DD format (e.g. ‘2015-04-20’).  The week ending dates are fixed based on week number across all years (therefore, we call them approximated), because weeks can shift a little across years and we still need the data to join across years.  However, users may find the more explicit dates more useful than the week of year numbers.  To select the modes, use the Week Mode dropdown.

A new source of reports has been added to the CropSignal inventory, available within the Reports topic.  The source is Pakistan Agriculture Research (listed as PAR) which releases reports for Pakistan for Cotton, Palm Oil, Cotton, Wheat, and Dairy.

Within the Seasonal Analysis Topic, GDA has added new derived variables to help analyze the NDVI time-series for a particular administrative unit location and crop type.  These frequency variables show the percentage of pixels for a given MODIS NDVI composite value that are within NDVI ranges:

1. 0.0 – 0.1
2. 0.1 – 0.2
3. 0.2 -0.3
4. …
5. 0.9 -1.0

These variables can show the spatial frequency spread of pixel values for additional breakdown analysis on top of the previously existing NDVI average value.  These variables are currently limited to the United States district level NDVI.

Previously, the topic filters would only allow you to select years and/or variables for which data was available in the CropSignal database – making it difficult to configure widgets to also include future years/months/variables for when that data inevitably becomes available.  We have remedied this deficiency by adding ‘Add future’, ‘Show all variables’ -type checkboxes to the major Topics which, when checked, will include five future years that can be selected as well as all available variables/months that can be included in the selection as well.

A new feature has been added for pivot charts – you can now override the default series order and customize it.  This can be useful when showing area/line charts where series are drawn ‘on top’ of one another.  You can control which one is on the top and which is in the back and so on.  See the new ‘Order Series’ button which opens a dialog where you can drag and drop the series in the desired order and save it.

Within the Seasonal Analysis Topic, GDA has added new derived variables for GDA-processed crop-specific NDVI to compare a given year with the prior year, 5 Yr Avg or 10 Yr Avg.  These variables are Timeshift and Delta.  Timeshift calculates the difference in days for a given date and the same NDVI from a prior year/5 Yr Avg/10 Yr Avg.  Delta calculates the difference in NDVI from a given date and the same date from the prior year/5 Yr Avg/10 Yr Avg.