Precision agriculture at Lyons Farm
Using Phenomics with hyperspectral cameras and LiDar to improve crop production and resilience
Phenomics, i.e. phenotyping many individuals for a great number of traits throughout the development of the plants, is still a bottleneck in crop science. Firstly, because field conditions are heterogeneous, and the inability to control environmental factors makes results difficult to interpret, and secondly, because of the technology limitation to integrate in time and space the performance of the crop in terms of capturing resources (e.g. radiation, water, nutrients) and how efficiently these resources are used.
With the development of airborne drones, these limitations can be reducing since different techniques approaches can be implemented. Besides vegetation indices (e.g. NDVI SR, RVI), for evaluating green biomass, multispectral imagers can be formulated to other different spectral indices targeting senescence evaluation, nutrient status, pigment degradation, photosynthetic efficiency, or water content. In addition, the LiDAR fully integrated onto a Service Drone G4 V2 UAV will directly measure the three- dimensional distribution of plant canopies as well as sub-canopy topography, thus providing high-resolution topographic maps and highly accurate estimates of vegetation height, cover, and canopy structure.
The pictures above show the Service Drone G4 V2 UAV being prepared for use at Lyons Farm
This new tool will allow us to measure traits as leaf area index, biomass, tillering, awn presence, leaf rolling, leaf angle, early vigor, pubescence, leaf glaucousness, flowering date, stem carbohydrates, nutrient content and others, and under field conditions.
Hyperspectral camera and LiDAR provides a cutting-edge technology at UCD Lyons Research Farm that will allow to meet the challenges of crop production through the study of the key abiotic and biotic factors affecting yield.
