Precision Farming and Control of Crop Production Series II

Dear Colleagues,

The industrial agri-food system that has been established over the last fifty years has led to indiscriminate exploitation, and irreversible deterioration, of natural resources falsely assumed to be unlimited and inexhaustible. The costs incurred in environmental and social terms due to intensive agriculture have been enormous, especially in terms of pollution, loss of biodiversity, soil fertility reduction, and marginal land abandonment, thus creating obvious sustainability issues. Today, a possible response to the negative trend described here is represented by the development of technologies and the implementation of the so-called precision agriculture (PA), or precision farming, whose birth dates back to the 1990s in the United States, where it continues to have the widest spread and technical and technological evolution.

The development of the technologies over the past few decades has made available platforms and sensors useful to acquire more and more accurate data from the observation of the terrestrial surface for what concerns both geometry and radiometry. At the same time, scientific knowledge has allowed us to develop methods and techniques of data treatment for extracting information about the state of the terrestrial surface and the natural resources. In this context, agriculture is one of the primary fields of application of the Earth observation techniques.

Data from remote sensors can provide relevant information about the development and the conditions of agricultural crops thanks to the availability of multi- and hyperspectral sensors. Precision farming, born of a need for a rational use of resources, is based upon the availability of very detailed and spatially distributed information relative to the conditions and the state of the crops in the field. Optic multi- and hyperspectral sensors and thermal ones measure the reflected and emitted radiations from the surface in the visible/infra-red wavelength; therefore, it is possible to determine some of the characteristics of vegetated surfaces on the basis of their interaction with the incident solar radiation (part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible/infrared near and medium) and/or on the basis of the emitted radiation (part of the electromagnetic thermal infrared spectrum).

Data acquisition is not a trivial operation in agriculture, mainly because information is not directly usable, if not by elaborating a lot of signals from appropriately calibrated sensors. Consequently, precision farming requires a cyclical process of data collection, in a closed chain control scheme, for crop management, the evaluation of decisions, with the peculiarity that a monitoring action cannot be limited to a single crop cycle but spans several years, using both historical information and estimations for the future.

Prof. Dr. Maria Grazia D'Urso
Dr. Alberto Guarnieri
Dr. Shibendu Ray
Guest Editors

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• crop
• precision farming
• growth index
• calibration camera
• multispectral image
• hyperspectral image
• thermal image
• platform
• sensor
• wavelength
• electromagnetic spectrum
• georeferencing
• geomatic monitoring
• productivity