Abstract
Precision agriculture (PA) is a management strategy that analyzes the spatial and temporal variability of agricultural fields using information and communication technologies with the aim to optimize profitability, sustainability, and protection of agro-ecological services. In the context of PA, this research evaluated the reliability of multispectral (MS) imagery collected at different spatial resolutions by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and PlanetScope and Sentinel-2 satellite platforms in monitoring onion crops over three different dates. The soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) was used for monitoring the vigor of the study field. Next, the vigor maps from the two satellite platforms with those derived from UAV were compared by statistical analysis in order to evaluate the contribution made by each platform for monitoring onion crops. Besides, the two coverage’s classes of the field, bare soil and onions, were spatially identified using geographical object-based image classification (GEOBIA), and their spectral contribution was analyzed comparing the SAVI calculated considering only crop pixels (i.e., SAVI onions) and that calculated considering only bare soil pixels (i.e., SAVI soil) with the SAVI from the three platforms. The results showed that satellite imagery, coherent and correlated with UAV images, could be useful to assess the general conditions of the field while UAV permits to discriminate localized circumscribed areas that the lowest resolution of satellites missed, where there are conditions of inhomogeneity in the field, determined by abiotic or biotic stresses.
Highlights
The agricultural sector is one of the areas of application of geographic information systems, remote sensing (RS) methods, and data [1]
The same applies to spatial resolution, which may not be suitable for determining variability within the field
Even though the satellite and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) maps had different index ranges, it was possible to see some similarities in the distribution of vigor in the onion field
Summary
The agricultural sector is one of the areas of application of geographic information systems, remote sensing (RS) methods, and data [1]. The launch of satellites by government space agencies and commercial earth-observing companies has provided a significant improvement in revisiting time and multispectral (MS) detection capability. In this respect, two examples are given by Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope satellites. Sentinel-2 satellites are equipped with sensors capable of exploiting as many as 13 spectral bands ranging from the visible to NIR and short wave infrared region, with spatial resolutions between 10 and 60 meters [7] and a temporal resolution of about 5 days at the European latitudes [8,9]. PlanetScope constellation composed of a large number of small nano-satellites equipped with RGB and NIR camera provides a 3–5 m ground sampling resolution with a one-day revisiting time [10]
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