Remote Sensing: Advancing the Science and the Applications to Transform Agriculture

摘要

Remote sensing has proven to provide agriculture with many different assessments for crop vigor and productivity. The continual evolution of remote sensing instrumentation and platforms has provided new opportunities to use these tools in the assessment of agricultural systems. The application of remote sensing to quantify the spatial variation in production fields across the Midwest over multiple years has revealed there are three stability zones: the high yielding stable zone, the low yielding stable zone, and the unstable zone. These are derived using a combination of thermal images to detect areas of water stress and the normalized difference vegetative index to assess crop vigor and efficiency of light capture. Development of tools using remote sensing coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning can transform agriculture through the ability to identify variable areas within fields but also determine the potential adaptive strategies to increase the profitability for each field while reducing the environmental impact through more efficient use of nutrients and pesticides. Development of new tools using remote sensing fulfills the vision of integrating many sources of information into decision making at the field and farm scale.