Applications of Ground-Based Remote Sensing for Precision Agriculture

Leaf color and plant vigor are key indicators of crop health. These visual plant attributes are frequently used by greenhouse managers, producers, and consultants to make water, nutrient, and disease management decisions. Remote sensing techniques can quickly quantify soil and plant attributes, but it requires humans to translate such data into meaningful information. Over time, scientists have used reflectance data from individual wavebands to develop a series of indices that attempt to quantify things like soil organic matter content, leaf chlorophyll concentration, leaf area index, vegetative cover, amount of living biomass, and grain yield. The recent introduction of active sensors that function independent of natural light has greatly expanded the capabilities of scientists and managers to obtain useful information. Characteristics and limitations of active sensors need to be understood to optimize their use for making improved management decisions. Pot experiments involving sand culture were conducted in 2003 and 2004 in a green house to evaluate corn and red pepper biomass. The rNDVI, gNDVI and aNDVI by ground-based remote sensors were used for evaluation of corn and red pepper biomass. The result obtained from the case study was shown that ground remote sensing as a non-destructive real-time assessment of plant nitrogen status was thought to be a useful tool for in season crop nitrogen management providing both spatial and temporal information.