AdamB - 9/5/2020 08:24

No, those are not existing tile lines. Although we do have ways to locate existing tile remotely, but it is condition dependent.

What you are seeing is our drainage analysis layer on top of the high res aerial photo and elevation data that we capture with the RTK drones. The drainage layer is the result of a virtual water simulation based on the captured topography of the field. The sink layer (red and yellow areas) shows where low spots are on the land that have high potential to retain water during excess moisture events. The streams layer shows where water would flow naturally on the current topography. Normally these types of reports are generated with hydrology algorithms in advanced GIS software, but we've been able to simplify the key elements that are important to a farmer and present that in a clear format on the Portal. We've also developed tools on the Portal that allow the user to interact with the data and view elevation profiles in real-time along paths (streams and user-generated) to help them quickly identify where the biggest obstacles are to flowing drainage. While there are many online systems used to display drone data, ours is the only one that is specifically designed for elevation and drainage data from the ground up, and farmer usability has always been the key focus during development.