As you sip a cup of tea, particularly tea from east China’s Fujian Province, two remote sensing satellites in orbit are monitoring the tea planting and maintenance. The two satellites, both launched in 2022, can obtain the images with a resolution higher than 0.5 meters and a width of 15 km. They serve the tea-producing area in Anxi County, Fujian Province, which is famous for its tea industry. The output value of the province’s whole tea industry chain exceeded 150 billion yuan (about 21.1 billion U.S. dollars) in 2022, while its tea exports exceeded 3.5 billion yuan. Both ranked first in the country. With the tea plantation area of 3.61 million mu (about 240,667 hectares), the province received 520,000 tonnes of raw tea output in 2022.
In order to drive the intelligent progress of tea production, the province applied remote sensing to provide accurate data analysis and services for tea planting, processing and sales.
Using remote sensing images, technicians combined the information such as meteorology, soil, agriculture and hydrology to digitally extract more than 40 indexes including area, elevation, slope, accumulated temperature, illumination, precipitation, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium of tea gardens and build a digital database, said Wei Leichen, vice-general manager of Satellite Link Bridge, one of developers of the two satellites.
According to the spectral analysis of the image data, the technicians obtained the index data of soil moisture and organic matter content from the tea garden and tea farmers have been recommended soil testing formulas and fertilization guidelines suitable for tea plots based on the abundance of soil nutrient elements and different climatic conditions, as well as tea tree varieties and tree ages.