Measuring and mapping crop vigour using an active optical sensor in an ultra low-level aircraft

Title
Measuring and mapping crop vigour using an active optical sensor in an ultra low-level aircraft
Publication Date
2009
Author(s)
Lamb, David
Trotter, Mark
Schneider, Derek
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1897-4175
Email: dschnei5@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:dschnei5
Editor
Editor(s): MG Trotter, EB Garraway and DW Lamb
Type of document
Conference Publication
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
University of New England, Precision Agriculture Research Group
Place of publication
Armidale, Australia
UNE publication id
une:10335
Abstract
An ultra low-level aircraft carrying an active NIR/Red CropCircle™ sensor was successfully deployed at an altitude of 3-5 m over a 270 Ha field of skip-row sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) to record and subsequently map photosynthetically-active biomass (PAB) via the simple ratio (SR) index. The 2-D, ULLA-PAB map derived from 20 m transects was found to reproduce the gross patterns of spatial variability observed in a PAB map derived from a metre-resolution airborne digital multispectral image re-sampled to a similar spatial resolution. The fact that this type of sensor contains its own light source hence can be operated irrespective of ambient light conditions offers crop managers a viable alternative to conventional imaging technologies especially when they have day-to-day access to aircraft already conducting low-level operations, for example crop dusting and reconnaissance, over their agricultural fields.
Link
Citation
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Precision Agriculture in Australasia, p. 31-40
ISBN
9781921597114
Start page
31
End page
40

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