Vegetation is a very complex eco-system and is influenced by, besides management practices, many environmental factors such temperature, rainfall, soil moisture. A web-based geo-spatial processing and visualization system is developed to assist practitioners and resource managers in making informed decisions about current season vegetation performance.

Actual field level information is sparce and not available in near-real time. To overcome the limitation of timely availability of field information, it is a recent trend to use information derived from space borne platform which provides repetitive and synoptic coverage of area. One of the most important indicators of evaluating performance of vegetation is the Normalised Vegetation Difference Index (NDVI) which is ratio of difference of NIR and red reflectance over their sum. Vast amount of historical and current data on NDVI is available from various sensors such as AWiFS, OCM, MODIS, PROBA. It is well known that there are considerable year to year variations in performance of vegetation system – mainly due to changing crop growing conditions. To account for them, information on temperature, rainfall and soil moisture is also provided.

The main outcome of the developed system is the platform it provides for monitoring of crop growth. With the use of developed web-based platform and analytical functionalities, it is possible to infer vegetation condition at various spatial and temporal scales. It is possible to compare area / region that is deviating from the average and / or particular year along with temperature and moisture condition. The developed web-GIS analysis platform can be exploited by the stake holders to make informed policy and / or management interventions at the right time.

There are three sections on this webpage (on Bottom strip). The section on reference layers has static information such as SOI administrative boundaries, Infrastructure (roads, railway lines), India mosaics prepared using microwave and optical data, DEM and rivers. Under “data visualization”, historical as well as most recent image data (Indian as well as global) of NDVI, Soil Moisture, Rainfall, Temperature are populated. Under “data analysis”, web based geospatial processing / functionalities for NDVI difference, range analysis, temporal classification, long term statistics can be performed on web.