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
Summary
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.
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