Towards Sustainability: Advanced Research on Precision Agriculture and Smart Farming
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Agriculture".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2027 | Viewed by 214
Special Issue Editors
Interests: mechanics and agricultural mechanization; forest mechanization
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: remote sensing; variable rate application; crop management; precision livestock; soil sensing
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue of Sustainability, “Towards Sustainability: Advanced Research on Precision Agriculture and Smart Farming”, focuses on the core themes of the global agricultural green transition and high-quality development. It systematically compiles cutting-edge achievements, technological breakthroughs, and applied research focuses on using existing knowledge to attain practical goals in the fields of precision agriculture (PA) and smart farming (SF), aiming to provide diversified technical paths and theoretical support for improvements to agricultural sustainability. Currently, global agriculture is confronted with multiple challenges, such as the tightening of resource constraints, intensifying ecological pressures, and unbalanced supply–demand structures. As core drivers of agricultural modernization, precision agriculture and smart farming strive to achieve the synergistic goals of efficient resource utilization, ecological risk management, and simultaneous improvement of production capacity and quality through technological empowerment.
The research included in this Special Issue will cover multi-dimensional technical systems and application scenarios, encompassing the innovative integration of core technologies such as IoT sensors, UAV remote sensing, satellite monitoring, machine learning decision models, and blockchain traceability. It focuses on key directions, including variable rate fertilization and irrigation, intelligent pest and disease control, dynamic monitoring of farmland ecology, digital adaptation for smallholder farmers, cross-regional agricultural data sharing, and precision livestock farming. Our approach is to not only present the effective application results of high-end technologies in large-scale farms but also to explore the adaptability of low-cost digital solutions in the smallholder economies of developing countries. Through multi-regional and multi-scale case studies, we hope to verify the practical value of integrating technology into farming in order to reduce agricultural water and fertilizer loss, cut carbon emissions, enhance livestock management, and increase the added value of agricultural products.
Meanwhile, our Special Issue will directly address the practical bottlenecks in technology implementation, including data barriers, cost thresholds, insufficient technological adaptability, and imperfect policy support systems, and propose optimized paths toward both innovation and feasibility. The overarching aim of this Special Issue is to build an interdisciplinary communication platform; consolidate research consensus among agronomy, information technology, ecology, economics, and other fields; and provide references for policymakers, researchers, and agricultural practitioners. The expected outcome is promotion of the development of precision agriculture and digital agriculture in more inclusive and sustainable directions, contributing to the achievement of global food security and a virtuous cycle of agricultural ecology.
Dr. Paola D'Antonio
Dr. Luis Conceição
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- precision agriculture
- digital agriculture
- agricultural sustainability
- technology integration
- smart agriculture
- resource optimization
- agricultural digital transformation
- ecological agriculture
- crop sensors
- precision livestock farming
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