Atlas

Color is absent in Atlas imagery where little to nothing grows – in these places, there is not enough vegetation to reflect or absorb any wavelengths of light. In the desert, sandy red expanses show up as black voids. What’s left is a palette of fully formed circles, and sometimes chunks of the pie – central pivot irrigators that are sustaining different crops, to varying degrees of success.

With field boundaries drawn, Atlas imagery looks like a blend between abstract art and stained glass. The orange on the left side of the image could be attributed to specific land management practices used there, such as double cropping – a process that seeks to harness the full potential of the calendar by planting more than one crop type, either at the same time or after a first harvest. A majority of these fields are terraces for rice farming, distinct in their oblong shape.

This is the farmland outside of Montreal: staggered, sharp, thin strips, built next to rivers and (sometimes) roadways. Known as “ribbon farming,” the practice of dividing the land into narrow areas originated in Europe, as a way to bring as many growers as possible in one town close to water resources. Dividing the land like this, too, allows for easy surveying and boundary establishment – a practice as relevant when the French migrated out across Canada to Montreal as it is today. We have taught Atlas to draw boundaries on its own, instantly, a practice that would take a human being several hours for each field.

If you were to drive down any of the roads in this image – those black lines running like seams across a patchwork of neat, square fields – you would struggle to determine degrees of difference. Don’t chalk this up to moving at 60 mph, but to your ability to only perceive certain bands of light. Satellites can move at over 17,000 mph. Their ability to capture many light bands outside the spectrum visible to humans brings the psychedelic hue to what is likely only degrees of yellow, green, and brown.

You can pull multiple data layers together in one image out of Atlas. What appears as one frame to the left, for example, actually represents farmland around the wending Arkansas River over the course of a year. Need to position yourself in time? The color key here: red pigments in the image represents developments of the crop in the spring; green, in the summer; and blue, for the fall. What crops are on the field themselves requires further analysis, but a safe bet is soybeans or rice – Arkansas ranks tenth and first in the country for those row crops.

Central pivots galore. New Jersey is often known for its greenhouse and nursery products sector, but it’s also a major producer of asparagus, bell peppers, eggplant, endive, lettuce, and spinach.