How will this be useful for a landuser such as myself (farmer, back-country wanderer) who doesn't know how to do a lot of coding, or have a github account?
I've taken a few GIS classes, and there are some cool things you can do with satellite imagery. You can use remote sensing to check up on crop health and growth. I did a small school project why I estimated the percentage of trees killed by pine beetles.
I'd do some research into QGIS, remote sensing, and NDVI if you are interested. You would want multi-spectral imagery from a satellite with Near Infrared sensors, and RapidEye has them.
That said, this is technical. It might be easier if you were comfortable enough with coding to get the imagery from their developer API. And GIS/remote sensing analysis is somewhat complicated. Plus, remote sensing doesn't analyze anything really, it just filters information. So you would have to be comfortable with the farm, the theory behind remote sensing, and the process in order to correctly interpret the data. I'm not familiar enough with agriculture to get really specific information from satellite imagery. So you might be putting a decent amount of work into get info you could just have gotten by walking out into your field.
Edit: there's a lot more uses like mattzero mentioned if you are using it for more than just farming. For instance, if you hunt or fish you can use satellite imagery to determine where specific ecosystems begin and end. So there is a lot you can do.
That's a good question! what kind of things do you want to be able to do with data? If you're a farmer, maybe this kind of data could help you understand which of your fields are stressed from lack of water, or which varietal of corn performs best during an uncommonly warm or cold growing season. If you're a wanderer than maybe you could quickly survey an entire national park to find yourself a nice open field that's far away from any roads and make that your next camping destination. The time slider is cool too--if you want to go see fire damage close up you could probably find patches that only burned recently. Or apply the same idea to a patch that burned down a few years ago, and check in on its recovery.
Actually that sound like a sweet project. You could go out and take pictures of a freshly burned fire, one that's 1 year old, one that's 2 years old, etc.
I don't think you need to be a coder to use timely data.
I spent twenty years as a fertilizer company agronomist. I first worked with aerial infrared crop photos in 1983. The industry has been slow to launch and been limited to high priced crops because of cost.
If fertilizer companies and ag consultants could piggy back on top of the state's purchase of imagery it could be a game changer. If all the states would do this you'd see an entire industry grow up using it.
A little old? It's supposed to have only a two week delay between the satellite taking the photo and it appearing in the free API. Am I missing something?
At around 5m/px, the imagery from planet labs doesn't currently have high enough resolution for it to be useful for tracing in OSM. It looks good only down to around z14ish.
But what they're doing is still really interesting. Their stated goal is to be able to image every part of the planet daily by the end of 2016. And it's possible in theory to process multiple passes of lower resolution imagery into a composite imagery layer with a higher effective resolution. So it wouldn't surprise me if they use their microsatellite approach to push into markets that are currently served only by hi-res imagery providers like Digital Globe (imagery from expensive satellites) and Pictometry (imagery from airplanes).
