Applying high-resolution visible-channel aerial imaging of crop canopy to precision irrigation management

Assaf Chen, Valerie Orlov-Levin and Moshe Meron

Agricultural Water Management, 2019, vol. 216, issue C, 196-205

Abstract: Canopy cover (or vegetation cover) maps serve in irrigation management mainly to determine the primary evapotranspiration (ET) coefficient, as radiation interception and evaporative surface area are directly related to canopy cover. Crop size and development with time depends on water supply; therefore, crop canopy maps are tools for the detection of the spatial uniformity of irrigation systems. Several aerial scan campaigns were deployed in the Upper Galilee of Israel in the 2017 and 2018 growing seasons to follow up and evaluate the irrigation uniformity and crop coefficients of peanuts and cotton by RGB scans of a Phantom 4 multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and DJI Mavic-Pro UAV equipped with RGB and near-infrared (NIR) sensors. Foliage intensity and coverage were enhanced by a green-red vegetation index (GRVI), which is a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-like process where the green channel replaced the NIR. The results demonstrated that the GRVI is suitable for the purpose of determining the vegetation cover. Furthermore, the GRVI yielded better results than the NDVI in recognizing phenological crop changes (especially senescence) and in detecting heterogeneity in field irrigation. Therefore, this research proves the applicability of a low-cost digital camera mounted on an easily accessible UAV for crop cover and actual, in-field, ET coefficients determination and irrigation uniformity evaluation.

Keywords: Canopy cover; Vegetation fraction; Green-red vegetation index (GRVI); Precision irrigation; Remote sensing; Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037837741831758X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:216:y:2019:i:c:p:196-205

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2019.02.017

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().