NDVI is a common measure in remote sensing for agriculture — capturing how much more near infrared light is reflected compared to visible red. It helps differentiate bare soil from grass or forest, detect plants under stress, and differentiate between crops and crop stages.
We are currently working with our friends at Blackbridge (RapidEye) to expand our agriculture tools. Farmers need more than just pixels — so our goal is to make it easy for the agriculture sector to get information out of imagery. Here is a look over New Holland, Illinois, taken on June 9th, 2012 at 6.5m resolution. RapidEye’s push-broom sensor offers Visible bands (RGB) as well as Near Infrared (760-850 nm) and a Red Edge (690-730 nm) band. NDVI above was processed in python with rasterio and uses the Near Infrared and Red bands, using a rainbow color ramp. The red, orange, and yellow quickly show the healthiest areas of each field. You can mouse over the image to see the visible spectrum (aka the regular image).
If you are interested in using NDVI with Mapbox ping Chris (@hrwgc), Charlie (@vruba) or me (@brunosan) on Twitter, and follow @Mapbox for more updates, tutorials, and cool pictures.