Abstract
Water and wind erosion are serious problems due to the loss of soil productivity. The coverage of soil, by means of cover crops or crops residues, is an effective tool to prevent wind and water erosion. The soil coverage could curb wind on the surface, avoid water runoff and reduce direct soil evaporation. Residue spatial distribution is the main factor to successful soil protection. The current work presents details of a prototype, design and validation as a measuring instrument to sense the height of vegetal crop residues based on a short-ranged laser distance sensor (LiDAR) and a computer numerical control (CNC) mechanism. The results obtained in this work showed a high level of confidence to estimate the height and composition of soil vegetal coverage.
Highlights
It is estimated that 1.1 billion hectares of land are affected by soil erosion, and from these, three million are lost each year for agriculture purposes
A distance sensor must be moved along a plane parallel to the ground by sweeping over a sufficiently representative surface, but without being too extensive, since it is important to know the medium-scale characteristics of the residue and vegetation coverage, as it is assumed that the vertical arrangement of the same coverage remains relatively constant over the whole farm parcel
Ultrasound-based technologies allow to measure the distance to certain objects or geometries, but it is difficult to determine their structure or to differentiate thin shapes because of the sensor’s wide detection cone, making it hard to determine the geometry of vegetal coverage, for example, with acceptable precision
Summary
It is estimated that 1.1 billion hectares of land are affected by soil erosion, and from these, three million are lost each year for agriculture purposes. The use of LiDAR technology has been proposed in recent literature for different applications to measure the soil coverage, canopy height, plant phenotyping among others [9,10,11,12] Another option is to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to fly over the field taking several pictures for processing. An RGB picture is taken; this can be processed with different software tools like the mentioned CobCal or other algorithms These algorithms aim to obtain indexes that are related to the area of soil that is covered with vegetal plants and mostly with the purpose of estimating the development of crops, assessing their growth, and estimating yield.
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