Abstract

Food security is a longstanding global issue over the last few centuries. Eradicating hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030 is still a key challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic has placed additional stress on food production, demand, and supply chain systems; majorly impacting cereal crop producer and importer countries. Short food supply chain based on the production from local farms is less susceptible to travel and export bans and works as a smooth system in the face of these stresses. Local drone-based data solutions can provide an opportunity to address these challenges. This review aims to present a deeper understanding of how the drone-based data solutions can help to combat food insecurity caused due to the pandemic, zoonotic diseases, and other food shocks by enhancing cereal crop productivity of small-scale farming systems in low-income countries. More specifically, the review covers sensing capabilities, promising algorithms, and methods, and added-value of novel machine learning algorithms for local-scale monitoring, biomass and yield estimation, and mapping of them. Finally, we present the opportunities for linking information from citizen science, internet of things (IoT) based on low-cost sensors and drone-based information to satellite data for upscaling crop yield estimation to a larger geographical extent within the Earth Observation umbrella.

Highlights

  • Food security has been a global challenge over the last few centuries

  • We present the opportunities for linking information from the citizen science, internet of things (IoT) based on low-cost sensors and drone-based information to earth observation (EO) satellite data for upscaling crop yield estimation to a larger geographical area

  • The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is having an unparalleled effect on our food systems and beyond

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Summary

Introduction

Food security has been a global challenge over the last few centuries. The competence of agriculture food production to support the increasing population has been a global concern for generations. Cereal crops; rice and wheat are the prime staple food consumed in most parts of the world, especially in Asia and Africa. Achieving self-reliance in cereal crop production is an effective way to promote nation-wide food security and achieve the SDG Zero Hunger target. The ongoing development and improvement of navigation and flight control system, ease of flight at low-altitudes, and ultra-high spatial resolution images (i.e., centimeter-level) offer great data solutions possibilities to monitor the crop development process at the local level. Despite these potentials, drone-based data solutions still face some challenges.

Research Need
Importance of Cereal Crops for Ensuring Food Security
Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Security
State-of-the-Art of Drone and Sensor Technologies
Drone Types and Categories
Suitable Sensors for Vegetation Scouting
Aims
Use of Drones for Cereal Crop Scouting
Crop Monitoring
Biomass Estimation
Yield Estimation
Correlating Crop Characteristics with Remote Sensing Data
Results
Opportunities and Challenges
Opportunities
Challenges
Findings
Conclusions and Outlook

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