Tracking weeds

We talk a lot about how the STA logger is a holistic, integrated weed management solution. The way it works is that while the weed control works are being conducted, it is reporting the activities, helping supervisors and managers coordinate their teams, and is making all data available in an easy to use GIS platform. It is essentially tracking your weeds location while you work. All of this is automatic. But what if you don’t want all that? What if you just need to complete a weed mapping and control project like you normally would with a handheld GPS? Or sometimes called “map and treat”. The STA logger is still the solution for you.

Tracking weed locatins and weed mapping

The STA logger tracks the location of the spray equipment it is attached to, and logs the location of spraying from the trigger. This is presented through 3 spatial data layers. The first is the “tracklog” which is a polyline the represents the path the unit travelled. It is useful for understanding where each member of your team travelled while trying to find weeds and is useful in identifying where gaps in effort might occur. The second is the “spray zone” which is a polygon layer represented the area of ground that was sprayed based on the duration of the trigger press. It is useful for comparing one units output to another, or the collective efforts of all units on a site. The third layer is the raw points. These are largely unprocessed data points from the unit recorded at one point per second. In each point you will have the date, time, battery level, coordinates, number of satellites, type of GPS fix, horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP), trigger status (pressed or not) and which selector switch option was chosen. This point data is equivalent to what you would get out of a handheld GPS device with the bonus that it is recorded and managed automatically. If you have workflows that use point data like this, this layer will be important to you.

Exporting the data

The data is yours. We have no need for it. And while we offer an arrangement of tools in our web portal, we understand that some users may need to download the data, analyse it in a third party application or supply it to a client or project team.

Through the STA logger web portal, you can download this raw point information to .csv file. A .csv (or comma separated values) file can be opened by spreadsheet applications such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. From there it can also be imported into a desktop GIS application.

There are two ways to approach the download; 1. Download it and then filter it in a spreadsheet application, or 2. Filter it first, and then download exactly what you want. Through the web browser portal, you can apply filters to the fields (columns) in the data table and even “filter by map extent”. This means it will filter to show the points that are currently on the screen. All others will be excluded.

From there you can apply further filters. For example, you might want to disregard all points that didn’t have weeds (no trigger presses). In this instance, you would be filtering the trigger column.

Perhaps you were only interested in one particular weed. In this instance, you would filter the selector column for the value that you are interested in.

You can then save the spreadsheet, analyse it, combine it with other data, import it into other GIS applications or whatever else you like.

The STA logger meets the needs of a weed tracking and map and treat project.