Application of Remote Sensing and Gis in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Under Changing Climatic Conditions

Abstract

Agricultural production systems are highly vulnerable to variations in climate, soil and topography of different regions. For sustainable agricultural management, all these factors need to be analysed on spatio-temporal basis. The advanced techniques like remote sensing, global positioning system and geographical information system can be of great use for their assessment and management. Remote sensing and GIS are very important tools having wide range of applications to tackle these issues. These technologies have manifold applications in agriculture including crop discrimination, crop growth monitoring/stress detection, crop inventory, soil moisture estimation, computation of crop evapo-transpiration, site-specific management/precision agriculture, crop acreage estimation and yield prediction. Timely and reliable information on crop acreage, growth condition and yield estimation can be highly beneficial to the producers, managers and policy planners for taking tactical decisions regarding food security, import/export and economic impact. Such information on regional basis can be made available with the use of remote sensing and GIS techniques. Remote sensing and GIS can also be used very effectively in land use/land cover analysis as well as damage assessment because of drought, floods and other extreme weather events An attempt has been made in the present study to review, analyse and evaluate the latest information regarding the application of remote sensing techniques for crop monitoring, crop condition assessment and yield estimation for sustainability of agriculture and natural resources under changing climatic scenarios.