Canopeo app provides benefits to urban and rural users

Friday, April 8, 2016

Corey Moffet of the USDA-Agricultural Research Service is among the growing number of fans of Oklahoma State University’s Canopeo app, especially when it comes to its ease of use and practicality.

Canopeo, developed jointly by the Oklahoma State University App Center and students and faculty in the department of plant and soil sciences, allows users to quantify green vegetation in a plant’s canopy in the field through photos taken using a smartphone.

A USDA-ARS range management scientist with the Southern Plains Range Research Station in Woodward, Moffet first learned of the Canopeo app in the spring of 2015 and started using it right away. The app proved so useful that he had his field technicians begin using the app come the summer.

“It’s a quick and very easy app to use,” he said. “There are both iPhone and android versions so almost everyone already has what they need to use it, plus it’s free.”

Moffet ranks the data collected through the app as being “very useful not only for researchers but for producers grazing cereal forages,” and speaks highly of the fact that both the raw image and interpreted image are accessible in the field via smartphone or back in the office.

“I also like its ability to record information about your field like a field name, when the crop was planted and the height of the crop,” he said. “In addition, the time, date and location of the measurement are recorded automatically. The ability to go back and look at other data from other locations and dates and make comparisons is particularly useful.”

Moffet believes the value of these data will only increase over time as the Canopeo user accumulates more and more records.

The free mobile app analyzes the images and provides an accurate measure of percent canopy cover for row crops, grassland, turfgrass or other green vegetation. The information can be used to monitor a crop’s growth or evaluate damage and allows the user to adjust management decisions.

“Green canopy cover is an excellent indication of crop progress, especially early in the growing season,” said Tyson Ochsner, Sarkeys Distinguished Professor in Applied Soil Physics with the OSU Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources.

The creation of Canopeo

A few years ago OSU plant and soil sciences Ph.D. student Andres Patrignani began developing a desktop computer program to analyze images of vegetation. His program was an improvement over existing commercial applications that were less accurate and tedious to use.

Fellow students and faculty were impressed, including Ochsner, Patrignani’s faculty adviser, who encouraged him to continue to develop his program. Though Patrignani’s software outperformed existing programs, it was tied to a desktop computer. A mobile version that could be used in the field was needed, but Patrignani wasn’t convinced farmers or agriculture researchers would find a mobile app useful.

“We were not sure how anybody would use it,” said Patrignani. “Then Dr. Ochsner showed me another app that analyzed nitrogen levels in leaves. He showed me a scientific paper about quantifying a different variable, the percentage of green canopy cover.”

The research paper, written by OSU graduate students studying the management of cattle grazed on winter wheat, looked at using the quantity of green canopy as an indicator of when to remove cattle to maintain a good grain yield at harvest.

“Now this (Canopeo) would be useful for that,” said Patrignani. “If you have 50 percent or more green canopy cover in wheat grazed by cattle then you can still get a good yield from your wheat (according to the research).”

Not knowing how to develop a mobile application for smartphones, Patrignani turned to the OSU App Center in 2014, which agreed to fund the app’s development and provide student programmers to translate the desktop program code to Apple’s iOS mobile language and graphic designers to develop a user interface.

The project also received funding from the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, a state agency that is part of DASNR, which recognized the app’s potential as a tool for managing cattle grazing on winter wheat.

After several weeks of work by App Center programmers, including overcoming hurdles like image processing time, a mobile version was for Apple devices was ready for beta testing.

"The first time they tried to process an image it took four or five minutes,” said Jai Rajendran of the OSU App Center. “They worked on it continuously until they got it down to milliseconds.”

The group also hired Marcus Gabilheri, a sophomore computer science student, to develop the Android version and to build a website – http://www.canopeoapp.com – where photos and data are stored in individual accounts set up by users.

Beneficial for both urban and rural uses

The latest versions of Canopeo are available for download from the online Apple Store and Google play.

“Anyone who is interested in how plants are doing in the field will find applications for this,” Ochsner said. “That could be people concerned about herbicide damage to their crops. It could be a golf course manager interested in the greenness of their turf. And it’s useful as a way to collect a stream of data for several of our research efforts. At its core it’s a quite basic tool with a lot of potential uses.”

Moffet agrees, adding a specific recommendation to producers whose livestock graze cereal forage crops, especially if the crop is dual use and they plan to harvest a grain crop after using it as pasture.

“The Canopeo app will allow producers to quickly and easily determine whether they are grazing the crop too light or too heavy, allowing them to make the best management decisions relative to their dual-purpose systems,” he said.

For information about the OSU App Center visit https://appcenter.okstate.edu/ or talk to App Center student interns in the lobby of the Henry Bellmon Research Center on the OSU Stillwater campus. Learn more about Canopeo at www.canopeoapp.com.