Abstract
Rice is one of the three major crops in the world and is the major crop in Asia. Climate change and water resource shortages may result in decreases in rice yields and possible food shortage crises. In this study, water-saving farming management was tested, and IOT field water level monitoring was used to regulate water inflow automatically. Plant height (PH) is an important phenotype to be used to determine difference in rice growth periods and yields using water-saving irrigation. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with an RGB camera captured sequential images of rice fields to estimate rice PH compared with PH measured on site for estimating rice growth stages. The test results, with two crop harvests in 2019, revealed that with adequate image calibration, the correlation coefficient between UAV-PH and field-PH was higher than 0.98, indicating that UAV images can accurately determine rice PH in the field and rice growth phase. The study demonstrated that water-saving farming is effective, decreasing water usage for the first and second crops of 2019 by 53.5% and 21.7%, respectively, without influencing the growth period and final yield. Coupled with an automated irrigation system, rice farming can be adaptive to water shortage situations.
Highlights
Global climate change is worsening, and production risk and loss of crops caused by weather disasters increase yearly
The flight altitude was 20 ± 2 m, and GSD was 4.58–5.48 mm/pixel. Weather changes, such as temperature, wind speed, and humidity had to be considered for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight, and flight dates were advanced or postponed 1 to 3 days according to weather forecasts (Table 1)
This study proposes a UAV image quality improving procedure, which can be applied to both irrigated and dryland crop
Summary
Global climate change is worsening, and production risk and loss of crops caused by weather disasters increase yearly. Rice farming faces problems of water resource shortage due to climate change and urbanization. 15 million hectares of rice irrigation areas in Asia may be influenced by water shortage [5]. The management of water, nutrients, and soil of the rice is improved, which increases the yield by. Field water and nutrient management is key to increasing rice yield [9,10]. To improve the quality and quantity of staple crop production and address problems arising from labor shortage, production management in farming must become more automated. An automated control irrigation system with water level sensors was set up in fields, and a commercial UAV was used to capture large-scale and continual field images
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
