Vegetation Indexes

A new version of MODIStsp (1.3.8) is on CRAN as of today ! The new version fixes a nasty issue introduced by changes in gdal_buildvrt behaviour in GDAL > 2.3, (https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/3221#comment:5) which caused problems in proper application of scales and offset on MODIS layers - see https://github.com/ropensci/MODIStsp/issues/163 If you are experiencing problems with MODIStsp and you have GDAL > 2.3 on your system, you are strongly encouraged to update the package!

We are happy to report that a new version of MODIStsp (1.3.4) is on CRAN as of today ! The new version introduces a strongly improved GUI (thanks mainly to @lwasser comments in her review for MODIStsp onboarding on ropensci). The new GUI facilitates the selection of layers to be processed, and allows interactive selection of the processing spatial extent over a map (thanks to @timsalabim and @timelyportfolio for implementing some changes on mapview to allow this!

A new version of MODIStsp (1.3.3) is on CRAN as of today ! Below, you can find a short description of the main improvements. Processing speed improvements Processing of MODIS layers after download (i.e., scale and offset calibration, computation of Spectral Indexes and Quality Indicators) is now much faster. As you can see in the figure, processing time was almost halved on my (not so fast) laptop. This was achieved by modifying all computation functions so to use raster::calc() and raster::overlay() (more on this in a later post).

We are glad to report that MODIStsp is now also available on CRAN ! From now on, you can therefore install it by simply using: install.packages("MODIStsp") In v 1.3.2 we also added the functionality to automatically apply scale and offset coefficients on MODIS original values according with the specifications of single MODIS products. Setting the new “Scale output values” option to “Yes”, scale factors and offsets are applied (if existing).