Publications

Montaghi, A; Bregaglio, S; Bajocco, S (2024). An open-source cloud-based procedure for MODIS remote sensing products: The nasawebservicepython package. ECOLOGICAL INFORMATICS, 79, 102433.

Abstract
Living in the era of "big data" demands an increase in the application and development of solutions for data ingestion in agroecological research, both in the private and public sectors. Among available data sources, satellite imagery is a viable solution to acquire large amounts of data at cheaper costs. Although cloud-based commercially distributed services are flourishing, open-source software able to assist practitioners and researchers in downloading and pre-processing satellite imagery is strongly demanded by the remote sensing community. This is especially true when looking at applications developed in Python, a programming language that quickly gained popularity in agroecological science. In this letter, we introduce nasawebservice version 1.0.0, a Python Package designed to automatically collect remotely sensed data from the NASA MODIS/VIIRS Land Products web service. The nasawebservice package contains a set of classes and methods to facilitate download operations for practitioners and researchers and to implement user-friendly data ingestion pipelines in local and cloud environments. The main advantage of nasawebservice is the reduction of pre-processing operations to use satellite images due to getting the data in JSON format, with consequent saving of computational time for large data download and analytic operational pipelines.

DOI:
10.1016/j.ecoinf.2023.102433

ISSN:
1574-9541