Retrieving LAI, chlorophyll and nitrogen contents in sugar beet crops from multi-angular optical remote sensing: Comparison of vegetation indices and PROSAIL inversion for field phenotyping

摘要

Remote sensing has gained much attention for agronomic applications such as crop management or yield estimation. Crop phenotyping under field conditions has recently become another important application that requires specific needs: the considered remote-sensing method must be (1) as accurate as possible so that slight differences in phenotype can be detected and related to genotype, and (2) robust so that thousands of cultivars potentially quite different in terms of plant architecture can be characterized with a similar accuracy over different years and soil and weather conditions. In this study, the potential of nadir and off-nadir ground-based spectro-radiometric measurements to remotely sense five plant traits relevant for field phenotyping, namely, the leaf area index (LAI), leaf chlorophyll and nitrogen contents, and canopy chlorophyll and nitrogen contents, was evaluated over fourteen sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) cultivars, two years and three study sites. Among the diversity of existing remote-sensing methods, two popular approaches based on various selected Vegetation Indices (VI) and PROSAIL inversion were compared, especially in the perspective of using them for phenotyping applications.