geoSpectRal is CRAN re-certified and how it can help in the battle against COVID-19 and support farmers with preventing harvest damages.
7
April, 2020
Health
Agriculture
Science
COVID-19 battle
Scientists did research about the disinfection ability of UV lights, specifically germicidal UV lights (also known as UV-C lights). Germicidal UV light is a type of light that’s best known for its ability to kill bacteria. It’s typically used to disinfect rooms and surfaces. Germicidal UV light, or UVC light, is a particular spectrum of ultraviolet light (UV). UV light occurs naturally from the sunlight or can be generated artificially in light fixtures and bulbs. You won’t be able to see light produced from germicidal UV lights because UV light does not produce visible light.
geoSpectral is a R-package that can support with analyzing, plotting, exporting radiometric data that is created during the research on using UV light spectrum to provide greater disinfection ability to battle COVID-19.
Agricultural application
Imagine a farmer who has a large yard and wants to know what impact the weather can have on his crop. Besidessun and rain, frost events that happen during spring can influence the growth of harvest. In some cases this impact can be so big that the whole harvest can be destroyed within hours. An automated frost prediction alert solution can be developed where actual measured data from an orchard, historical climate data and weather forecast data are combined, analyzed and used for providing growers early frost warnings (up to 5 days in advance) so that they can take appropriate countermeasures and save their crop and reach their yield targets. With the capabilities of R and our package geoSpectRal, a model like this can be built.
What is geoSpectRal
It is an R package that stores spectral, temporal and spatial attributes of field measurement data. Spectral data is usually obtained through radiometric measurements of the electromagnetic energy at various wavelengths. The package also offers methods for accessing and manipulating the spectral (and non-spectral) data. geoSpectRal was initially created to answer needs encountered in bio-optical oceanography, remote sensing, environmental and earth sciences. However anyone using spatial/temporal/spectral data of any kind can possibly make use of tools and methods provided by the package. The following S4 classes:
- Spectra class (stores spatial/temporal/spectral aspects of data),
- SpcHeader class (stores metadata in an R list object),
- SpcList class (makes a collection of Spectra objects in an R list),
and basic data access and manipulation methods for importing, accessing and subsetting data, converting to/from R data.frames, analyzing, plotting, exporting scientific data are provided. Once spectral data is imported into a geoSpectral object, the statistical and data processing power of R is available for various kinds of scientific analyses.
geoSpectRal v0.17.5 is now CRAN certified, this means that it is compliant to be used on 13 different flavors of R (from Linux to Windows to MacOS and many others).
Licensing
The package is issued with a GPLv3 license.
More information