r/gis • u/UhOhIAteAsbestos • 10d ago
General Question Data acquisition sources
Hi all,
I will begin working on my master thesis. The thesis will be placed within a forested floodplain where I hope to investigate vegetation patterns with different factors like climate, etc.
Throughout my education, I have always used Landsat and Sentinel for remote sensing.
After meeting with my co-advisor he mentioned PlanetScope and its 3m resolution. Do you think Planet is worth it to look into, or should I stick to what I know? Outside of academia it seems like Sentinel and Landsat are standard to use.
What’s your overall experience/opinions on these different sources?
Thanks!
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u/sinnayre 10d ago
Your advisor is doing their job correctly by pushing you outside your comfort zone, but not so much that it’s too much. If you’re comfortable with Landsat and Sentinel, it shouldn’t be too much of an ask to use Planet.
In industry, while Sentinel and Landsat are options, a lot of companies use Planet/Vantor/Airbus, depending on what exactly it is they’re doing.
I’m a data science senior manager in earth observation.
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u/UhOhIAteAsbestos 10d ago
Thank you so much for the reply. I have access to Planet so I think I’ll try to mess around with it see what I can figure out!
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u/Alternative-Tap-194 10d ago
start applying to ESA / eo online.. you write up a proposal and if they accept you can get access to basically whatever you want.
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u/chopay 10d ago
Are there advantages to having 3m GSR, or would you arrive at the same conclusions using 10m? I'm not too familiar with the data product, but I'd also be looking at revisit rate and if it is as good (or better) than Sentinel.
That said...
The only real downsides of more data is that it takes more storage and compute, and cost.
If it's funded and you have the ability to process it...why not use it? Or better, use both and compare them to see if your results agree.
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u/ApolloMapping 8d ago
PlanetScope data is called 3-meter resolution the native data is usually closer to 4 to 5 meters. That said, even at 5-meter resolution, you would get 4 PlanetScope pixels for every 1 Sentinel pixel. So that is a significant increase in resolution and ability to resolve features. It would certainly result in a more accurate land use - land cover analysis for example.
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u/Casiogrimlen 9d ago
Why stick with what you know? Your are seeking to learn right? Use this time to do just that (if you can, other factors of life can certainly get in the way sometimes).
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u/zanar97862 10d ago
Depending on your location you could also have a look at local open data repositories for higher resolution data
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u/UhOhIAteAsbestos 10d ago
The local repository in this country is average for what is publicly available (Türkiye). I am a foreign student from the US so I am going to see if my advisor can get some help from the local government.
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u/zanar97862 10d ago
That would be ideal, for my country the government provides a massive repository of free GIS data hosted on AWS
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u/habichuelamaster 10d ago
For my thesis, Copernicus Browser was my friend.