Abstract
Many remote sensing applications are devoted to the agricultural sector. Representative case studies are presented in the special issue “Advances in Remote Sensing of Agriculture”. To complement the examples published within the special issue, a few main applications with regional to global focus were selected for this review, where remote sensing contributions are traditionally strong. The selected applications are put in the context of the global challenges the agricultural sector is facing: minimizing the environmental impact, while increasing production and productivity. Five different applications have been selected, which are illustrated and described: (1) biomass and yield estimation, (2) vegetation vigor and drought stress monitoring, (3) assessment of crop phenological development, (4) crop acreage estimation and cropland mapping and (5) mapping of disturbances and land use/land cover (LULC) changes. Many other applications exist, such as precision agriculture and irrigation management (see other special issues of this journal), but were not included to keep the paper concise. The paper starts with an overview of the main agricultural challenges. This section is followed by a brief overview of existing operational monitoring systems. Finally, in the main part of the paper, the mentioned applications are described and illustrated. The review concludes with some key recommendations.
Highlights
Remote sensing techniques are widely used in agriculture and agronomy
The present paper summarizes the main remote sensing applications, with a focus on regional to global applications
This review aims to provide an overview of recent remote sensing developments in terms of regional and global applications for agriculture
Summary
Remote sensing techniques are widely used in agriculture and agronomy. The use of remote sensing is necessary, as the monitoring of agricultural activities faces special problems not common to other economic sectors [1]. As productivity can change within short time periods, due to unfavorable growing conditions, agricultural monitoring systems need to be timely This is even more important, as many items are perishable. The present paper summarizes the main remote sensing applications, with a focus on regional to global applications. It provides arguments for enhancing investments in agricultural monitoring systems. Interesting applications of remote sensing, such as precision agriculture (variable-rate technology) [14,15] and water-related applications (e.g., retrieval of actual evapotranspiration) are not covered For the latter, a special issue on crop water use estimation is currently prepared, with J.
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