Avenues of Remote sensing in Agriculture

Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or any phenomenon without making any physical contact with the object by means of radiation. It is a phenomenon that has numerous applications including photography, surveying, geology, forestry and many more. But it is in the field of agriculture that remote sensing has found significant use.

The process involves an interaction between incident radiation and the targets of interest. The most useful electromagnetic radiation in remote sensing includes visible light (VIS), near infrared (NIR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR), to thermal infrared (TIR) and microwave bands. Passive remote sensing sensors record incident radiation reflected or emitted from the objects while active sensors emit their own radiation, which interacts with the target to be investigated and returns to the measuring instrument. The behaviour and interaction of this radiation is studied and inference is drawn.

With the ever elevating food demand and limited input resources, there is a need for efficient management of resources. Along with that, the production depends on various other factors like soil, climate and management practices. The collective virtue of all these factors is very difficult to predict. Hence, agricultural monitoring systems should be developed for higher crop productivity through data-driven crop management. Thus, use of remote sensing is very crucial in monitoring of agricultural field, crop & soil health, water management and its quality, and atmospheric conditions with emphasis to yield.

                During the last two decades, remote sensing techniques are applied to explore agricultural applications such as crop discrimination, crop acreage estimation, crop condition assessment, soil moisture estimation, yield estimation, precision agriculture, soil survey, agriculture water management, agro meteorological and agro advisories. The application of remote sensing in agriculture, i.e. in crops and soils is extremely complex because of highly dynamic and inherent complexity of biological materials and soils. However, remote-sensing technology provides many advantages over the traditional methods in agricultural resources survey. The advantages include

●        capability of synoptic view

●        potential for fast survey

●        capability of repetitive coverage to detect the changes

●        low cost involvement

●        higher accuracy

●        use of hyperspectral data for specific information

The applications of remote sensing in agriculture are as following:

●        Crop production forecasting

●        Irrigation monitoring and management

●        Assessment of crop damage and crop progress

●        Crop identification

●        Crop acreage estimation

●        Crop yield modelling and estimation

●        Identification of pests and disease infestation

●        Soil moisture estimation

●        Soil mapping

●        Monitoring of droughts

●        Water resources mapping

●        Identification of planting and harvesting dates

●        Land cover and land degradation mapping

●        Identification of problematic soils

●        Collection of past and current weather data

●        Crop intensification

●        Precision farming

●        Compliance monitoring

To effectively utilize the information on crops for improvement of economy there is a need to develop state or district level information system based on available information on various crops derived from remote sensing and GIS approaches. The governments can use remote sensing data in order to make important decisions about the policies they will adopt or how to tackle national issues regarding agriculture. A new and non-traditional remote sensing application involves the implanting of nano-chips in plant and seed tissue that can be used in near-real time to monitor crop. Clearly, these and other new approaches will reinforce the importance of remote sensing in future analysis of agricultural sciences.

source:teamplantscience