CropSignal News

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.

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.