Chapter 17 - Smart farming to support agricultural crop damage assessment: interweaving Earth Observation and IoT data

Abstract

Agriculture is strongly influenced by the rapidly growing population and the human-induced climate change. There is a constant increasing demand to enhance farming productivity and deal with the extreme weather conditions that affect crop performance and yield. To ensure food security and sustainable environmental management, it becomes necessary to modernize the agriculture domain and therefore an automated and data-driven approach for crop damage assessment is suggested. Until now, decision-making for crop management is made based on manually collected data from the field, which is a costly, slow, and error-prone process. Thus plenty of smart farming solutions are introduced for monitoring crop performance and health. This chapter presents a newly developed web service called ResAGRI (Resilient and Sustainable Agriculture) which is designed to deliver location-based information on climate-related crop damage assessment. The suggested method precisely detects crop damages at a parcel level of detail by interweaving field data collected from in situ Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Earth Observation (EO) satellites, reducing the need for field visits. Three pilots were designed in Greece located in Thessaly, Rhodope, and Crete regions. The crop types of cotton, tomato, and grape vines were assessed during the growing seasons of 2020 and 2021. Based on the acquired field weather data, severe weather events affecting the crops were identified. Damage maps for every harmful event were generated by applying a pre-post analysis and by exploiting location-based modelled past NDVI time series. The disastrous events and the corresponding crop damages are addressed and discussed. The suggested method is efficient as the detected extreme weather events and crop damages have been verified by appraisers who visited the area to perform the field damage assessment.