Arable Web 9.2.0 Release Notes

Date

August 30, 2021

Instance affected

Production

Hostnames

arable.arable.com

Browsers

Chrome 92, Edge 92, Safari 14.0.3, iPad 12/13

Type of Release

Minor Release

Version

9.2.0

Description

The Sites feature has been updated in all the pages across Arable Web. The specific additions in this release are Alerts, Graph, Export, Teams, Notes and Analytics. Sites reframe how your data is conceptualized, from a device-centric paradigm to a place-centric paradigm such as a field or block. A site can link multiple device deployments (a.k.a., “locations”) together and associate the data with a physical place. Sites also link remote-sensed data and weather forecasts with device data.

The Map page shows all the operational sites of an organization. Operational sites are those that have at least one measurement update during the last week. The measurements that are available to select are the same as before. If multiple Mark devices contribute to a site, their values are aggregated (most are averaged). 

As you deploy an Arable Mark, it will show up in the Unassigned Device tab of the Map page. The Arable Mark deployment will no longer need to be named, as we save this effort on the site level. Instead, the deployment will automatically be named with its device ID and a timestamp for when it was deployed. At the beginning of the site naming process, you will be taken through several wizards to validate the auxiliary devices connected to the Mark, and to draw a site boundary. You will be given a starting point in the form of a 1-hectare square (100m x 100m) around the Mark location when creating a site. Other Mark devices already deployed in the vicinity may also show up on the map; you can identify the device ID by hovering over the Arable Mark icon, and decide whether to include it or not. Note that the site area cannot exceed 10 square km when drawing this boundary.

There are three states for an Arable Mark deployment in a site, which can be edited as part of the site creation process or later on the Sites page through the Edit Sites menu. The default state is “Included,” which means that the deployment will be included in the site measurement aggregation if it is within the boundary. The second state is “Assigned;” if that is selected, the Arable Mark deployment will stay with the site even if it is later moved outside of the site boundary. “Excluded” means you specifically don’t want a certain Mark deployment to feed its data into the site measurements. 

Finally, it is important to assign a season to the site so that you can track crop-specific GDD and growth stages. 

To help you get started on the transition from location-view to Sites, Arable Customer Success has a script that can be run and automatically generate sites for your current active Mark deployments; it will also transition your seasons and alerts settings. More information on this will come during Sites onboarding with Customer Success.

A few other, Sites-related improvements have been made to the Alert Settings page. The alert thresholds can now be set by a Team Admin in addition to an Org Admin. The default alert subscriptions are now specific to each organization where they are set, instead of applied to all your organizations. Every user can now delete a site-specific alert definition. Finally, in order to avoid excessive alerts, we have standardized on using a 6-hour hysteresis unless otherwise described in the info modals.  

The Seasons page for Sites has a new banner that will help you ensure assignment of active seasons to each site, and to see where growth stages are defined for GDD alerting. There are also a set of additional default crop-varietals, among them a set of new potato varieties. If you can’t find your crop-varietal, select crop-type = Other and varietal = Unspecified and let Arable Customer Success know. We will be happy to implement the correct crop-varietal for you. You will also see that some varieties now have a default season duration in addition to default growth stages. As with default growth stages, the default season duration can be easily modified.

The Teams page banner has become more powerful with Sites; you can now actually assign sites to teams using the Unassigned info modal. You can also use the banner to quickly see which teams have which sites and devices, and print to a PDF. As before, you need to be an Org Admin to create a team, but Team Admins can invite new Members and new Team Admins to a team. 

Graph and Export have received similar Sites updates. There is an organization selector on both; you will now select sites instead of deployment locations in the drop-down. 

Note: you can still search for a site based on the device ID in the drop-down, and you can select up to 10 sites at a time for rendering. Only operational sites (sites that have had updated measurements within the last 7 days) are displayed for comparison in the Graph-Rank page. The GPS coordinates at the centroid of the site is shown in the file header instead of its own column in location-view.

On the Device page, you will see a list of sites associated with a device instead of the previous locations. In order to clean up the list of devices displayed as inactive (e.g., pulled out of the field without an undeployment procedure), if a device has not communicated for more than 9 months, it will automatically be changed to removed state. If it starts communicating again, it will switch back to an active state without any manual intervention.  

All custom analytics dashboards have been enhanced to allow the selection of a site in addition to a device. This will be especially useful during end-of-season reviews, when you’ll want a continuous data time-series from start to finish, regardless of any changes to the Mark devices that have been deployed in the field. 

Beta testing customers will see that the Water Insights page has received several updates. A growth-stage visualization has been added on top of the Water Balance graph to be able to enforce different irrigation practices per growth stage. If you hover over a growth stage in this visualization, you will be able to read out both the GDD threshold for the growth stage as well as the actual date when it occurred. The visualization provides a 14-day forecast for GDD if the next growth stage is near. This GDD forecast is also available in Graph-Time and on the Plant tab. 

Another enhancement to the Water Insights page is the flexibility to aggregate water metrics into daily, weekly, monthly and per-growth-stage. Selecting the option you want in the top left corner of the table renders the aggregation in the table itself and in the associated water balance and soil moisture graphs. 

We have also added a second option for capturing irrigation data in the system. A manual irrigation entry pop-up is accessible from both the Water Balance graph and the site card on the site’s page. This is especially useful for those who don’t have a dripline system automatically connected through a GEMS pressure switch, or who need to adjust measured irrigation data. 

The Graph-Time page has one new measurement, Relative Humidity, that can be used in combination with the other measurements when creating charts. 

Description

We updated our rainfall processing system to address some recent instances of underreporting. In some cases, if a data record's time stamp overlapped with another (say, both wind and rain were reported at exactly the same time), only one of them was recorded, resulting in a possible undercount of either wind or rainfall data. This may have affected some of your past data. We have a fix already in place to gather clean data moving forward. Please reach out to your account rep if you'd like more info.

In the previous release, the cumulative precipitation measurement in Graph-Time did not align zero with the start date selected. This is now resolved with this release. 

In Graph-Time, we had labeled both the hourly and daily Solar Radiation with the same measurement unit in the previous release. This has been corrected to show daily as MJ/m2 and hourly as W/m2.

Graph-Time has been updated for Sites so that GDD are displayed correctly. 

Team Members and Team Admins can now be used with Sites, and can create and see site cards. 

Team Members are now shown in alphabetical order on the Teams page to facilitate easy review for longer lists.

Previously, the “Last 7 Days” and “Next 7 Days” at the top of the Canopy Evapotranspiration and Precipitation bar graphs on the Plant tab were given with no significant figures and thus did not pick up smaller updates. This is now aligned with the actual  bar graphs and shows the value with two decimals.

If a user were part of more than one organization, it was not possible to select  which org to show at the top of the Account page. We removed this presentation, since there are now organization selectors on most pages.

Description

An entire organization should transition to using Sites all at the same time, since naming convention is different than with the location view, and could cause confusion if some have transitioned and others have not. If it is not possible to update the complete org to Sites all at once, please use Sites for dedicated devices and users to limit any impact on other users. An automated naming for new Arable Mark deployments will occur as soon as one of the device owners has Sites enabled. The location name will then be device ID + deployment time stamp. Note that users who have location-view enabled can still go and edit this name in the Weather tab.  

The site-based user interface is supported by a materialized database view that refreshes every 3 minutes. This means that it can take a minute or two before some of the configuration changes you do fully update the user interface. Foremost visible in case of site creation, where a new device may be lingering in the Unassigned Device tab for a bit even after having been assigned. We will work to minimize the impact over the coming months.

While you can name a site from the Unassigned Devices tab on the Map page, there is no way to go from the Devices page and create a site today. We will address this in a future release.

The wind direction in degrees is only available in the daily CSV file from the Export page. Hourly has only the cardinality variable shown. This will be corrected with a hotfix.

Only the current season can be shown on the Water details tab. A season selector is expected in the next release. The capability to create multiple parallel seasons across multiple crops at the same site (and Mark location) is also under consideration for future development, but may take some time to complete.

For Water Balance deployments connecting the GEMS pressure switch on the analog interface, there will be no wind direction provided in the UI. A future combination of local wind speed and remote-sensed wind direction is planned.  

The loading time for the Graph-Rank tab can be prolonged in certain circumstances (e.g., a slow internet connection). We plan to improve the performance in an upcoming release.

To enable confirmation of successful soil moisture probe installation in real time, we plan to add Bridge status as part of the deployment message from the Mark to the backend, and have it populate in the API and UI (on the Devices page). As of now, the update will come with the first complete sync. 

Frost and heat alerts are currently triggered based on the max/min 5-minute temperature value of the hour. A hysteresis of 2°C above the threshold has to be achieved before another alert would be triggered again. This means that one 5-min anomaly value could lead to a retriggering of the alert. An improved algorithm for the min/max temp that uses, e.g., the average of the top five 5-min values, is being assessed for an upcoming release. 

Currently the NDVI measurement and graph do not show or deal with a drop due to temporary cloudy days. To circumvent any misunderstandings, users can also review the solar radiation with the two-measurement graph feature. A future enhancement to incorporate cloud cover when calculating NDVI is expected.