CropSignal News

A new “Options” Menu button has been added to the location filter dropdown on most Topics, replacing the Hide L2/L3 toggle, which have now been moved into the Options menu dropdown.  The Selected Location Map action has also been moved to this menu.

What’s new is that you can auto-select a group of locations with one click such as “Central American Countries”.  Several pre-defined groupings have been added, but you can also save your own groupings by selecting a number of locations and then saving the group with a name.

GDA has added specially filtered crop-and-location-specific NDVI data to the Seasonal Analysis topic along with NDVI forecasts for the remainder of the current year.  Initially, the locations and crops that this data is provided for is as follows:

• Argentina L3 (Departments) Corn, Soybeans
• Brazil L3 (Meso-Regions) Corn 1st , Corn 2nd, Soybeans 1st
• China L2 (Provinces) Corn
• Paraguay L2 (Departments) Soybeans 1st
• Ukraine L2 (Oblasts) Corn
• Uruguay L1 (National) Soybeans
• United States L3 (Districts) Corn, Soybeans, Wheat Spring, Wheat Winter, Wheat Durum, Sunflower, Cotton

The CropSignal Tutorial PDF file has been updated to reflect the recent feature changes to CropSignal (especially Pivot Widgets and their controls).  You can download the PDF under the Help link.

The Monthly Crop Stats topic is now available.  It is similar to the Annual Crop Stats topic except it provides statistics that are monthly.  Such crops include oil palm, tea, cocoa, and coffee and available sources include Stat Canada, Indonesia BPS, and Malaysian Palm Oil Board.

New statistics from the State Statistics Service of Ukraine are now available in the Annual Crop Stats topic!

When generating widgets within any topic, new widgets are prepended to any existing widgets in the topics results windows.  Previously, any existing widgets were deleted and replaced with the new ones.  You can still delete one or all of the widgets in the topic results window.  You can save one or all of the widgets to a dashboard.

In the weather topic, you can now see crop-specific growing degree day (GDD) calculations for US States, Districts and Counties for some major crops.  There is a new crop dropdown where any crops that have this data available for it.  You can choose ‘Non crop specific weather’ here to get the same functionality as before – global subnational weather data.  The crop specific GDD data use formulas particular to the crop type and calculated for time windows for which the crop calendar specifies for that location.

New reports from EMATER for Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil have been added to the Reports topic.

You can now set specific unit system customizations to each widget on your dashboard.  You can choose between Metric and US Customary systems (and post widgets of different types on the same dashboard) and also choose the scaling method for each type of attribute.  You can choose whether area values are displayed in hectares (metric),  1000 hectares, 1000000 hectares, and similarly for quantity and US customary type values.  Yield values can be displayed in thousandths (specifically to convert Yield values from tonnes per hectares to kilograms per hectare).

We’ve added a new mapping help feature in relevant Topics so you can see the spatial coverage of statistics by data source.  For example, if you’re not sure if a data source only covers one country, or multiple countries, you can look  at the map to determine coverage.  To utilize this, click the little globe icon at the top of the Source filter box which will pop open a dialog box where the map will appear.