Mostly prime tapped stands between seven and twenty years on mineral upland. Wintering runs six to eight weeks and takes NDVI down by around 0.2 before it recovers.
“Every February the dashboard went red across the board. We knew it was just the leaves. After the second year nobody looked at it at all.”
What happened
Wintering is normal and it takes the whole estate out of band at once. SemaiSens suspends the stand age band for that window instead of alerting on it, and will not run year on year comparison through leaf fall either, because wintering does not land in the same weeks every year. The first February on the platform the estate got no wintering alerts at all. What it did get, in the third week, was one block flagged for not recovering with the others. That block had white root disease in a patch the team had not reached yet.
What did not work
“It goes quiet for those eight weeks and that took getting used to. You want the system to say something. It is right not to, but it feels strange the first time.”
What they would tell a peer
“The value was not what it told us. It stopped telling us things that were not true, so the team started reading it again.”
