The largest invasion of desert locusts to hit the Horn of Africa in decades is wreaking havoc on local crops. Gro Intelligence’s newly introduced daily NDVI satellite-data series is ideal for tracking the widening locust destruction.
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is posting daily updates of the locust infestation, calling it “an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods.” The FAO update for Feb. 3 says swarms are increasing in Ethiopia and Somalia and continuing to move south to Kenya. Other locust swarms are threatening Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and India and Pakistan.
Gro’s daily NDVI data provides users with near-real-time insights of plant health and crop condition globally, although cloud cover can obscure measurements on any particular day. Gro also has 8-day and 16-day NDVI data series, which record data over a longer period. While this overcomes the problem of cloud cover, NDVI readings come with a time lag.
Daily NDVI, which is short for normalized difference vegetation index, can be an early indicator of plant stress and is particularly helpful in assessing the impact of natural disasters. The daily NDVI on Gro’s platform comes from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3 satellites.
This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.