scholarly journals Use of UAS Multispectral Imagery at Different Physiological Stages for Yield Prediction and Input Resource Optimization in Corn

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 2392
Author(s):  
Razieh Barzin ◽  
Rohit Pathak ◽  
Hossein Lotfi ◽  
Jac Varco ◽  
Ganesh C. Bora

Changes in spatial and temporal variability in yield estimation are detectable through plant biophysical characteristics observed at different phenological development stages of corn. A multispectral red-edge sensor mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) can provide spatial and temporal information with high resolution. Spectral analysis of UAS acquired spatiotemporal images can be used to develop a statistical model to predict yield based on different phenological stages. Identifying critical vegetation indices (VIs) and significant spectral information could lead to increased yield prediction accuracy. The objective of this study was to develop a yield prediction model at specific phenological stages using spectral data obtained from a corn field. The available spectral bands (red, blue, green, near infrared (NIR), and red-edge) were used to analyze 26 different VIs. The spectral information was collected from a cornfield at Mississippi State University using a MicaSense multispectral red-edge sensor, mounted on a UAS. In this research, a new empirical method used to reduce the effects of bare soil pixels in acquired images was introduced. The experimental design was a randomized complete block that consisted of 16 blocks with 12 rows of corn planted in each block. Four treatments of nitrogen (N) including 0, 90, 180, and 270 kg/ha were applied randomly. Random forest was utilized as a feature selection method to choose the best combination of variables for different stages. Multiple linear regression and gradient boosting decision trees were used to develop yield prediction models for each specific phenological stage by utilizing the most effective variables at each stage. At the V3 (3 leaves with visible leaf collar) and V4-5 (4-5 leaves with visible leaf collar) stages, the Optimized Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (OSAVI) and Simplified Canopy Chlorophyll Content Index (SCCCI) were the single dominant variables in the yield predicting models, respectively. A combination of the Green Atmospherically Resistant Index (GARI), Normalized Difference Red-Edge (NDRE), and green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI) at V6-7, SCCCI, and Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) at V10,11, and SCCCI, Green Leaf Index (GLI), and Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index (VARIgreen) at tasseling stage (VT) were the best indices for predicting grain yield of corn. The prediction models at V10 and VT had the greatest accuracy with a coefficient of determination of 0.90 and 0.93, respectively. Moreover, the SCCCI as a combined index seemed to be the most proper index for predicting yield at most of the phenological stages. As corn development progressed, the models predicted final grain yield more accurately.

Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 340
Author(s):  
Ewa Panek ◽  
Dariusz Gozdowski

In this study, the relationships between normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) obtained based on MODIS satellite data and grain yield of all cereals, wheat and barley at a country level were analyzed. The analysis was performed by using data from 2010–2018 for 20 European countries, where percentage of cereals is high (at least 35% of the arable land). The analysis was performed for each country separately and for all of the collected data together. The relationships between NDVI and cumulative NDVI (cNDVI) were analyzed by using linear regression. Relationships between NDVI in early spring and grain yield of cereals were very strong for Croatia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. This means that the yield prediction for these countries can be as far back as 4 months before the harvest. The increase of NDVI in early spring was related to the increase of grain yield by about 0.5–1.6 t/ha. The cumulative of averaged NDVI gives more stable prediction of grain yield per season. For France and Belgium, the relationships between NDVI and grain yield were very weak.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Hillary M. O. Otieno ◽  
George N. Chemining’wa ◽  
Shamie Zingore

To mitigate low maize productivity, improve on-farm planning and policy implementation, the right fertilizer combinations and yield forecasting should be prioritized. Therefore, this research aimed at assessing the effect of applying different nutrient combinations on maize growth and yield and in-season grain yield prediction from biomass and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) readings. The research was done in Embu and Kirinyaga counties, in Central Kenya. Nutrient combinations tested were P+K, N+K, N+P, N+P+K, and N+P+K+Ca+Mg+Zn+B+S. The results showed consistently lowest and highest NDVI reading, dry biomass, and grain yields due to P+K and N+P+K+Ca+Mg+Zn+B+S treatments, respectively. Positive NDVI responses of 56%, 14%, 15%, and 15% were recorded with N, P, K, and combined Ca+Mg+Zn+B+S, respectively. These nutrients, in the same order, recorded 54%, 20%, 8%, and 18% positive responses with biomass. The GreenSeeker NDVI reading with grain yield and aboveground dry biomass with grain yield recorded R2 ranging from 0.23-0.53 and 0.30-0.61 (in Embu), and 0.31-0.64 and 0.30-0.50 (in Kirinyaga), respectively. When data were pooled, the prediction strength increased, reaching a maximum of 67% and 58% with NDVI and biomass, respectively. Yield prediction was even more robust when the independent variables were combined through multiple linear model at both 85 and 105 days after emergence. From this research, it is evident that the effects of balanced fertilizer application are detectable from NDVI readings—providing a tool for tracking and monitoring nutrient management effects—not just from the nitrogen perspective as commonly studied but from the combined effects of multiple nutrients. Also, grain yield could be accurately predicted early before harvesting by combining NDVI and biomass yields.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3663
Author(s):  
Shenzhou Liu ◽  
Wenzhi Zeng ◽  
Lifeng Wu ◽  
Guoqing Lei ◽  
Haorui Chen ◽  
...  

Accurate estimation of the leaf area index (LAI) is essential for crop growth simulations and agricultural management. This study conducted a field experiment with rice and measured the LAI in different rice growth periods. The multispectral bands (B) including red edge (RE, 730 nm ± 16 nm), near-infrared (NIR, 840 nm ± 26 nm), green (560 nm ± 16 nm), red (650 nm ± 16 nm), blue (450 nm ± 16 nm), and visible light (RGB) were also obtained by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with multispectral sensors (DJI-P4M, SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd.). Based on the bands, five vegetation indexes (VI) including Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), Leaf Chlorophyll Index (LCI), Normalized Difference Red Edge Index (NDRE), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Optimization Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (OSAVI) were calculated. The semi-empirical model (SEM), the random forest model (RF), and the Extreme Gradient Boosting model (XGBoost) were used to estimate rice LAI based on multispectral bands, VIs, and their combinations, respectively. The results indicated that the GNDVI had the highest accuracy in the SEM (R2 = 0.78, RMSE = 0.77). For the single band, NIR had the highest accuracy in both RF (R2 = 0.73, RMSE = 0.98) and XGBoost (R2 = 0.77, RMSE = 0.88). Band combination of NIR + red improved the estimation accuracy in both RF (R2 = 0.87, RMSE = 0.65) and XGBoost (R2 = 0.88, RMSE = 0.63). NDRE and LCI were the first two single VIs for LAI estimation using both RF and XGBoost. However, putting more than one VI together could only increase the LAI estimation accuracy slightly. Meanwhile, the bands + VIs combinations could improve the accuracy in both RF and XGBoost. Our study recommended estimating rice LAI by a combination of red + NIR + OSAVI + NDVI + GNDVI + LCI + NDRE (2B + 5V) with XGBoost to obtain high accuracy and overcome the potential over-fitting issue (R2 = 0.91, RMSE = 0.54).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Herrero-Huerta ◽  
Pablo Rodriguez-Gonzalvez ◽  
Katy M. Rainey

Abstract Background Nowadays, automated phenotyping of plants is essential for precise and cost-effective improvement in the efficiency of crop genetics. In recent years, machine learning (ML) techniques have shown great success in classification and modelling of crop parameters. In this research, we consider the capability of ML to perform grain yield prediction in soybeans by combining data coming from different optical sensors via RF (Random Forest) and XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting). During the 2018 growing season, a soybean experiment was performed at the Agronomy Center for Research and Education (ACRE) in West Lafayette (Indiana, USA). Images were acquired by the Parrot Sequoia Multispectral Sensor and the S.O.D.A. compact digital camera on board senseFly eBee UAS (Unnamed Aircraft System) solution at different dates. Next, a standard photogrammetric pipeline is carried out by SfM (Structure from Motion). Multispectral imagery serves to analyse the spectral response of the soybean end-member in 2D. In addition, RGB images are used to reconstruct the study area in 3D, evaluating the physiological growth dynamics per plot via height variations and crop volume estimations. As ground truth, destructive grain yield measurements were taken at the end of the growing season. Results Algorithms and feature extraction techniques were combined to develop a regression model to predict final yield from imagery, achieving an accuracy of over 90.72% by RF and 91.36% by XGBoost. Conclusions Results provide practical information for the selection of phenotypes for breeding coming from UAS data as a decision support tool, affording constant operational improvement and proactive management for high spatial precision.


Author(s):  
Julius Adewopo ◽  
Helen Peter ◽  
Alpha Kamara ◽  
Ibrahim Mohammed ◽  
Bernard Vanlauwe ◽  
...  

Rapid assessment of maize yields in smallholder farming system is important to understand its spatial and temporal variability and for timely agronomic decision-support. Imageries acquired with unmanned air vehicles (UAV) offer opportunity to assess agronomic variables at field scale, however, it is not clear if this can be translated into reliable yield assessment on smallholder farms where field conditions, maize genotypes, and management practices vary within short distances. This study was conducted to assess the predictability of maize grain yield using UAV-derived vegetation indices (VI), with(out) biophysical variables, in smallholder farms. High-resolution images were acquired with UAV-borne multispectral sensor at 4 and 8 weeks after sowing (WAS) on 31 farmers’ managed fields (FMFs) and 12 nearby Nutrient Omission Trials (NOT), all distributed across 5 locations within the core maize region of Nigeria. The NOTs included non-fertilized and fertilized plots (with and without micronutrients), sown with open pollinated or hybrid maize genotypes. Acquired multispectral images were post-processed into several three (s) vegetation indices (VIs), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference red-edge (NDRE), green-normalized difference vegetation index (GNDVI). Biophysical variables, plant height (Ht) and percent canopy cover (CC), were measured with the georeferenced plot locations recorded. In the NOTs, the nutrient status, not genotype, influenced the grain yield variability and outcome. The maximum grain yield observed in NOTs was 9.3 tha-1, compared to 5.4 tha-1 in FMF. Without accounting for between- and within-field variations, there was no relationship between UAV-derived VIs and grain yield at 4WAS (r<0.02, P>0.1), but significant correlations were observed at 8WAS (r≤0.3; p<0.001). Ht was positively correlated with grain yield at 4WAS (r=0.5, R2=0.25, p<0.001), and more strongly at 8WAS (r=0.7, R2=0.55, p<0.001), while relationship between CC and yield was only significant at 8WAS. By accounting for within- and between-field variations in NOTs and FMF (separately) through linear mixed-effects modeling, predictability of grain yield from UAV-derived VIs was generally (R2≤0.24), however, the inclusion of ground-measured biophysical variable (mainly Ht) improved the explained yield variability (R2 ≥0.62, RMSEP≤0.35) in NOTs but not in FMF. We conclude that yield prediction with UAV-acquired imageries (before harvest) is more reliable under controlled experimental conditions (NOTs), compared to actual farmer-managed fields where various confounding agronomic factors can amplify noise-signal ratio.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy C. Westhues ◽  
Gregory S. Mahone ◽  
Sofia da Silva ◽  
Patrick Thorwarth ◽  
Malthe Schmidt ◽  
...  

The development of crop varieties with stable performance in future environmental conditions represents a critical challenge in the context of climate change. Environmental data collected at the field level, such as soil and climatic information, can be relevant to improve predictive ability in genomic prediction models by describing more precisely genotype-by-environment interactions, which represent a key component of the phenotypic response for complex crop agronomic traits. Modern predictive modeling approaches can efficiently handle various data types and are able to capture complex nonlinear relationships in large datasets. In particular, machine learning techniques have gained substantial interest in recent years. Here we examined the predictive ability of machine learning-based models for two phenotypic traits in maize using data collected by the Maize Genomes to Fields (G2F) Initiative. The data we analyzed consisted of multi-environment trials (METs) dispersed across the United States and Canada from 2014 to 2017. An assortment of soil- and weather-related variables was derived and used in prediction models alongside genotypic data. Linear random effects models were compared to a linear regularized regression method (elastic net) and to two nonlinear gradient boosting methods based on decision tree algorithms (XGBoost, LightGBM). These models were evaluated under four prediction problems: (1) tested and new genotypes in a new year; (2) only unobserved genotypes in a new year; (3) tested and new genotypes in a new site; (4) only unobserved genotypes in a new site. Accuracy in forecasting grain yield performance of new genotypes in a new year was improved by up to 20% over the baseline model by including environmental predictors with gradient boosting methods. For plant height, an enhancement of predictive ability could neither be observed by using machine learning-based methods nor by using detailed environmental information. An investigation of key environmental factors using gradient boosting frameworks also revealed that temperature at flowering stage, frequency and amount of water received during the vegetative and grain filling stage, and soil organic matter content appeared as important predictors for grain yield in our panel of environments.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Yi

<p>     Accurate and timely spatial distribution of crops is of great significance to agricultural security issues. They are not only important parameters for regional crop growth monitoring, yield prediction, model simulation, but also important basis for government decision-making to assess food security and predict comprehensive productivity of agricultural resources. The Shiyang River Basin is the inland river basin with the highest development intensity and the most prominent water resource conflicts in arid regions of Northwest China. The timely and accurate acquisition of crop distribution information in the watershed can provide data support for alleviating the water resource conflicts in the Shiyang River Basin. However, there is no publically available in-season crop distribution information with high spatial resolution in the watershed. To solve this problem and generate accurate ,in-season crop-type map with high spatial resolution, this study uses multi-temporal sentinel2 data to generate spectrum, texture, vegetation index, red edge multi-feature sets while exploiting random forest classification algorithm(RF).the study designed Experiments to evaluate what kind of feature is most effctitve and further dig which spectral information is most important for the training RF model to map crop types in Shiyang River Basin. The experimental results show that the spectral information outperforms other features in the highest classification accuracy, followed by vegetation index information and red edge index information, and texture information has no effect on crop classification in the watershed. Temporal information has a significant impact on crop classification. the classification accuracy increases with the progression of time, and the accuracy reaches a plateau (94%)around DOY 218. The highest accuracy for single-date classification is 87%, and for multi-temporal is 94.8%. The classification performance of SWIR1 band of Sentinel2 is better than the visible and near-infrared bands commonly used in crop classification at present, and crop classification based on the Sentinel2 Visible-NIR-SWIR1 three-band combination mode can achieve the effect of full-band classification. The Visible -NIR-SWIR1 data of sentinel2 before DOY218 was used to generate the 2019 crop distribution map of Shiyang River Basin, with an overall accuracy of 93.5%.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2752 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyan Zhang ◽  
Jinming Zhao ◽  
Guijun Yang ◽  
Jiangang Liu ◽  
Jiqiu Cao ◽  
...  

Yield evaluation of breeding lines is the key to successful release of cultivars, which is becoming a serious issue due to soil heterogeneity in enlarged field tests. This study aimed at establishing plot-yield prediction models using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based hyperspectral remote sensing for yield-selection in large-scale soybean breeding programs. Three sets of soybean breeding lines (1103 in total) were tested in blocks-in-replication experiments for plot yield and canopy spectral reflectance on 454~950 nm bands at different growth stages using a UAV-based hyperspectral spectrometer (Cubert UHD185 Firefly). The four elements for plot-yield prediction model construction were studied respectively and concluded as: the suitable reflectance-sampling unit-size in a plot was its 20%–80% central part; normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and ration vegetation index (RVI) were the best combination of vegetation indices; the initial seed-filling stage (R5) was the best for a single stage prediction, while another was the best combination for a two growth-stage prediction; and multi-variate linear regression was suitable for plot-yield prediction. In model establishment for each material-set, a random half was used for modelling and another half for verification. Twenty-one two growth-stage two vegetation-index prediction models were established and compared for their modelling coefficient of determination (RM2) and root mean square error of the model (RMSEM), verification RV2 and RMSEV, and their sum RS2 and RMSES. Integrated with the coincidence rate between the model predicted and the practical yield-selection results, the models, MA1-2, MA4-2 and MA6-2, with coincidence rates of 56.8%, 58.5% and 52.4%, respectively, were chosen for yield-prediction in yield-test nurseries. The established model construction elements and methods can be used as local models for pre-harvest yield-selection and post-harvest integrated yield-selection in advanced breeding nurseries as well as yield potential prediction in plant-derived-line nurseries. Furthermore, multiple models can be used jointly for plot-yield prediction in soybean breeding programs.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fapeng Yan ◽  
Wei Shangguan ◽  
Jing Zhang ◽  
Bifeng Hu

Abstract. Depth to bedrock serves as the lower boundary of soil, which influences or controls many of the Earth’s physical and chemical processes. It plays important roles in geology, hydrology, land surface processes, civil engineering, and other related fields. This paper describes the materials and methods to produce a high-resolution (100 m) depth-to-bedrock map of China. Observations were interpreted from borehole log data (ca. 6,382 locations) sampled from the Chinese National Important Geological Borehole Database. To fill in large sampling gaps, additional pseudo-observations generated based on expert knowledge were added. Then, we overlaid the training points on a stack of 133 covariates including climatic images, DEM-derived parameters, land-cover and land-use maps, MODIS surface reflectance bands, vegetation index images, and the Harmonized World Soil Database. Spatial prediction models were developed using the random forests and gradient boosting tree, and ensemble prediction results were then obtained by these two independently fitted models. Finally, uncertainty estimation was generated by the quantile regression forest model. The 10-fold cross-validation showed that the ensemble models explain 57 % of the variation in depth to bedrock. Based on comparison with depth-to-bedrock maps of China extracted from previous global predictions, our predictions showed higher accuracy. More observations, especially those in data-sparse areas, should be added to training data, and more covariates with high precision should be used to further improve the accuracy of spatial predictions. The resulting maps of this study are available on Figshare at the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7011524.v1. And they are also available for download at http://globalchange.bnu.edu.cn/ .


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