Oklahoma State University has come up with a smartphone app that can tell you how well plants are doing.
Canopeo started as a computer program to help researchers who had to look at vegetation photos pixel by pixel.
"You'd have to go through at least 100 pixels for every photo just to start to get a measure of green canopy cover," said plant and soil sciences professor Tyson Ochsner. "So, that might take five or 10 minutes for a photo, and we had hundreds of photos to process."
The app measures the ratio of vegetation to the ground in an image in real time. It counts the green pixels in images to accurately measure green canopy cover.
"The app is particularly useful in the early stages of plant development, where you can sort of quantify the evolution from planting or emergence of a given plant to fully covered," said PhD student Andres Patrignani, who developed the initial version of Canopeo.
Patrignani envisions the app being used in several different fields.
"A crop consultant may want to monitor what is the development of a specific crop. Turf management may want to use this application to monitor the development of a turf patch or maybe to quantify the incidence of a disease, how severe," Patrignani said.
The OSU App Center helped develop it into an Apple and Android mobile app.
