High-Resolution Multisensor Remote Sensing to Support Date Palm Farm Management

Maggie Mulley, Lammert Kooistra and Laurens Bierens
Additional contact information
Maggie Mulley: Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
Lammert Kooistra: Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
Laurens Bierens: TEC-IB B.V., Oude Veiling 29, 2635 GK Den Hoorn (ZH), The Netherlands

Agriculture, 2019, vol. 9, issue 2, 1-22

Abstract: Date palms are a valuable crop in areas with limited water availability such as the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, due to their hardiness in tough conditions. Increasing soil salinity and the spread of pests including the red palm weevil (RPW) are two examples of growing threats to date palm plantations. Separate studies have shown that thermal, multispectral, and hyperspectral remote sensing imagery can provide insight into the health of date palm plantations, but the added value of combining these datasets has not been investigated. The current study used available thermal, hyperspectral, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and visual Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images to investigate the possibilities of assessing date palm health at two “levels”; block level and individual tree level. Test blocks were defined into assumed healthy and unhealthy classes, and thermal and height data were extracted and compared. Due to distortions in the hyperspectral imagery, this data was only used for individual tree analysis; methods for identifying individual tree points using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) maps proved accurate. A total of 100 random test trees in one block were selected, and comparisons between hyperspectral, thermal and height data were made. For the vegetation index red-edge position (REP), the R-squared value in correlation with temperature was 0.313 and with height was 0.253. The vegetation index—the Vogelmann Red Edge Index (VOGI)—also has a relatively strong correlation value with both temperature ( R 2 = 0.227) and height ( R 2 = 0.213). Despite limited field data, the results of this study suggest that remote sensing data has added value in analyzing date palm plantations and could provide insight for precision agriculture techniques.

Keywords: remote sensing; date palms; precision agriculture; plantation management; thermal; hyperspectral (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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