Application of UAVs in Crop Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

In the past two decades, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drone-based remote sensing technology, has developed rapidly in precision agriculture. UAVs possess significant advantages of a simple construction, strong mobility, and high spatial–temporal resolution, with synchronously obtained images. Thus, UAVs could provide complementary information during key crop growth periods currently lacking in satellite and remote sensing data. One of the greatest advantages is that UAVs can be equipped with various sensors, such as RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal, RGB depth cameras and LiDAR, with UAVs having been widely used to acquire crop traits, such as the plant height, leaf area index (LAI), chlorophyll content, biomass and yield with different modeling algorithms, which have also developed rapidly. Traditional simple modeling algorithms (i.e., linear regression and multiple linear regression) could not meet the demand of high accuracy in precision agriculture. Compared with the former, the nonparametric modeling algorithms (i.e., machine learning and deep learning methods) could improve the accuracy significantly. Meanwhile, physical model retrieval methods (i.e., SAIL and PROSAIL models) coupled with UAV imagery were developed to improve the mechanical explanation in crop parameters retrieval. Moreover, UAVs equipped with different sensors have recently become an important approach for fast and nondestructive high-throughput phenotyping in crop breeding, becoming a powerful tool for studying phenomics and genomics. Users willing to derive phenotypic parameters from large fields and tests with minimum effort on field work and with the aim of obtaining highly reliable results require the development of methods and applications for field phenotyping using UAVs, having demonstrated great potential as a tool for crop monitoring at fine and regional scales. We are pleased to invite you to submit original research articles and reviews to this Special Issue of Application of UAVs in Crop Monitoring.

This Special Issue aims to provide a forum for the dissemination of achievements related to the research and applications of UAV techniques for crop monitoring, welcoming original research articles and reviews. Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• UAV imagery processing and fusion;
• Early detection and mapping of crop types;
• Retrieval of crop physiological and biochemical parameters;
• Crop nutrition status monitoring and diagnosis;
• Crop biotic and abiotic stress detection;
• Crop grain yield and quality estimation;
• High-throughput field phenotyping for crop breeding.

Dr. Hengbiao Zheng
Guest Editor

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