REMOTE SENSING AND

GIS IN AGRICULTURE

PRESENTE

MONITORING CROP STATUS

Identifying Stressed Plants.

Chlorophyll is essential part of photosynthesis.

Amount of Chlorophyll is estimated.
By combining more than one bands of the recorded
remote sensing data we can create vegetation indices
and estimate crop status.

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Estimating water content from remote sensing

Water is essential for plant growth.

As a result stomata is released by the process of
transpiration.
If water is insufficient the plant is stressed and the heat is
not removed.
This heat can be detected by REMOTE SENSING by using
parts of spectrum that is sensitive to heat.
Green : average.
blue : sufficient
red : low.

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Combating pests and diseases

Addition to plant under stress and lack of water we

can also find plant effected by pests.
It is achieved by combining agricultural knowledge and
remote sensing.
The red part in the below picture shows the plants
effected by pests.
Destruction caused by pests reduces leaf area index.
We can identify LAI hence we can find the insect
attack at an early stage.

CROP IDENTIFICATION

Why do we need to identify crops??

As it increases the financial benefits if the country.

To plan imports and exports.

Cadastral mapping:

It is nothing but mapping of the boundaries of the

field.
Cadastral maps are in vector format and provides
some special data.
It is generally used by national authorities.

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How to identify crop types with Remote

sensing??

Vegetation is generally green in colour but shades of

green is different for various crops.

True colour image

False colour image

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Remote sensing data required:

To identify the type of crop we need to know the

growth cycle of particular crops.
Also we have to know how the crops reflect the near
infra red at each of their various growth stages.

May (Belgium)

August (Belgium)

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If we compare the same fields in the two images, we

can see that in some cases the signal is different.
Fields that appear red are full of vegetation, whereas
those that appear blue either have very little or no
vegetation at all.
By having knowledge on when the crop is cultivated
and harvested and by studying 2 or more images from
the same growth period we can find the type of crops.

Image classification.

ESTIMATING CROP YIELD

Estimating crop yield using only remote

sensing:

There are two ways to estimate the crop yield. They

are: using only remote sensing and other also uses
some extra data.

In may

In august

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In may, crops are at peak of their growth.

In august, plant is focusing its energy in producing the
crop and not producing green biomass.
Chlorophyll breakage and brown, yellow colour
appears to naked eye.

How can we estimate crop yield by seeing

remote sensing image??

Comparing satellite images with crop yield data of the

crop fields in image.
The image was processed and vegetative index is
formed and compared to crop yield.
The estimation obtained is limited that particular
period of time only.

The use of NDVI (normalized difference vegetation

index) is fast and easy method.

False colour image

NDVI image

Thank you