PiMapping® data services

PiMapping® data services supply quantified, per-pixel data on crop growth and water use, produced by eLEAF, which has continued under the Terramira name since June 2026. Water and irrigation authorities need to know how much water crops actually consume, which is hard to measure on the ground, and vegetation indices such as NDVI give only relative values. PiMapping® reports physical quantities instead: evapotranspiration in mm, biomass production in kg/ha, water productivity in kg/m3 and crop water stress, per day, week or month.

The layers are computed with eLEAF's SEBAL and ETLook energy-balance algorithms, which combine satellite observations of land surface temperature, surface albedo and vegetation cover with meteorological and geographical data; eLEAF's Meteo-Look adds air temperature, wind speed and humidity on a 250 m grid. Data are available in near real time for single fields up to whole basins, countries or continents, with time series going back up to 20 years for insurance risk assessment. They are delivered as data layers in formats matched to the client's management system, via API or through the Terramira platform, and can be used in GIS tools such as QGIS and ArcGIS.

eLEAF leads the consortium that provides the data in FAO's open WaPOR portal: decadal evapotranspiration, biomass and water productivity for Africa and the Near East from 2009, global at 300 m since version 3, which draws on Sentinel-2, Landsat and VIIRS inputs. Water agencies using the data include the Souss Massa River Basin Agency in Morocco and the Inkomati Catchment Management Agency.