Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
3.6
3.6
Journals
Agriculture
Special Issues
Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics
share announcement

Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics

A special issue of Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472). This special issue belongs to the section "Digital Agriculture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2023) | Viewed by 19901

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Rachid Lhissou

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Eau Terre Environnement Centre, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Quebec City, QC G1K 9A9, Canada
Interests: precision agriculture; UAVs; GIS; remote sensing data-based modeling; crop mapping; soil salinity mapping; digital mapping
Prof. Dr. Karem Chokmani

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Centre Eau Terre Environnement, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Quebec City, QC G1K 9A9, Canada
Interests: remote sensing; precision agriculture; deep learning; geomatics; spatial and temporal variability of water resources; microclimate; UAVs
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Saeid Homayouni

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Centre Eau Terre Environnement, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Quebec City, QC G1K 9A9, Canada
Interests: remote sensing; geomatics; analysis of optical, SAR, and UAV Earth observations through artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for agro-environmental applications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, the development of geoinformatics has been marked by a meteoric rise thanks to the current revolution in the digital world and the increasing accessibility of geospatial technology and information. In particular, the technological advances in computer systems' processing and storage capacity to manage the large volume of geographic data have effectively revolutionized smart agriculture.

Agriculture is one of the sectors most deeply affected by this digital revolution. By investing our scientific research and development in this revolution, agriculture will be able to maintain itself and face its constraints, notably the shortage of workforce, the growing demand due to population growth, the environmental impact, and climate change. In this perspective, this Special Issue focuses on geoinformatics methods' role in agricultural applications. Hence, it welcomes highly interdisciplinary quality studies that use machine and deep learning techniques, GIS, GNSS, the Internet of Things, remote sensing, and geospatial modeling in agricultural concerns. Topics of interest include but are not limited to spatialized management of agricultural practices, monitoring of agricultural land and soil conditions, optimization of operations, management of production, and analysis of agricultural policies’ implementation.

Dr. Rachid Lhissou
Prof. Dr. Karem Chokmani
Prof. Dr. Saeid Homayouni 
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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

  • geospatial information, technology, and systems
  • remote sensing (optical, radar, thermal, and lidar)
  • artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning
  • precision and smart agriculture
  • global navigation satellite systems
  • Internet of Things
  • computer vision and image processing
  • crop science and phenotyping
  • crop monitoring and characterization
  • digital soil mapping

Published Papers (7 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

Jump to: Review

19 pages, 4583 KiB  
Article
A Convolutional Neural Network Method for Rice Mapping Using Time-Series of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Imagery
by Mohammad Saadat, Seyd Teymoor Seydi, Mahdi Hasanlou and Saeid Homayouni
Agriculture 2022, 12(12), 2083; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12122083 - 05 Dec 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2631
Abstract
Rice is one of the most essential and strategic food sources globally. Accordingly, policymakers and planners often consider a special place in the agricultural economy and economic development for this essential commodity. Typically, a sample survey is carried out through field observations and [...] Read more.
Rice is one of the most essential and strategic food sources globally. Accordingly, policymakers and planners often consider a special place in the agricultural economy and economic development for this essential commodity. Typically, a sample survey is carried out through field observations and farmers’ consultations to estimate annual rice yield. Studies show that these methods lead to many errors and are time-consuming and costly. Satellite remote sensing imagery is widely used in agriculture to provide timely, high-resolution data and analytical capabilities. Earth observations with high spatial and temporal resolution have provided an excellent opportunity for monitoring and mapping crop fields. This study used the time series of dual-pol synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of Sentinel-1 and multispectral Sentinel-2 images from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 ESA’s Copernicus program to extract rice cultivation areas in Mazandaran province in Iran. A novel multi-channel streams deep feature extraction method was proposed to simultaneously take advantage of SAR and optical imagery. The proposed framework extracts deep features from the time series of NDVI and original SAR images by first and second streams. In contrast, the third stream integrates them into multi-levels (shallow to deep high-level features); it extracts deep features from the channel attention module (CAM), and group dilated convolution. The efficiency of the proposed method was assessed on approximately 129,000 in-situ samples and compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The results showed that combining NDVI time series and SAR data can significantly improve rice-type mapping. Moreover, the proposed methods had high efficiency compared with other methods, with more than 97% overall accuracy. The performance of rice-type mapping based on only time-series SAR images was better than only time-series NDVI datasets. Moreover, the classification performance of the proposed framework in mapping the Shirodi rice type was better than that of the Tarom type. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

27 pages, 14069 KiB  
Article
Investigating Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Data Efficiency in Studying the Temporal Behavior of Wheat Phenological Stages Using Google Earth Engine
by Hajar Saad El Imanni, Abderrazak El Harti and Jonathan Panimboza
Agriculture 2022, 12(10), 1605; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12101605 - 03 Oct 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2630
Abstract
Crop monitoring is critical for sustaining agriculture, preserving natural resources, and dealing with the effects of population growth and climate change. The Sentinel missions, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, provide open imagery at a high spatial and temporal resolution. This research aimed (1) to evaluate [...] Read more.
Crop monitoring is critical for sustaining agriculture, preserving natural resources, and dealing with the effects of population growth and climate change. The Sentinel missions, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, provide open imagery at a high spatial and temporal resolution. This research aimed (1) to evaluate the temporal profiles derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series data in deducing the dates of the phenological stages of wheat from germination to the fully mature plant using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) JavaScript interface and (2) to assess the relationship between phenological stages and optical/ SAR remote sensing indices for developing an accurate phenology estimation model of wheat and extrapolate it to the regional scale. Firstly, the temporal profiles derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 remote sensing indices were evaluated in terms of deducing the dates of the phenological stages of wheat. Secondly, the remote sensing indices were used to assess their relationship with phenological stages using the linear regression (LR) technique. Thirdly, the best performing optical and radar remote sensing indices were selected for phenological stage prediction. Fourthly, the spatial distribution of wheat in the TIP region was mapped by performing a Random Forest (RF) classification of the fusion of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel 2 images, with an overall accuracy of 95.02%. These results were used to characterize the growth of wheat on the TIP regional scale using the Temporal Normalized Phenology Index (TNPI) and the predicted models. The obtained results revealed that (1) the temporal profiles of the dense time series of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 indices allowed the dates of the germination, tillering, jointing heading, maturity, and harvesting stages to be determined with the support of the crop calendar. (2) The TNPIincrease and TNPIdecrease revealed that the declining part of the NDVI profile from NDVIMax, to NDVIMin2 revealed higher TNPI values (from 0.58 to 1) than the rising part (from 0.08 to 0.58). (3) The most accurate models for predicting phenological stages were generated from the WDVI and VH–VV remote sensing indices, having an R2 equal to 0.70 from germination to jointing and an R2 equal to 0.84 from heading to maturity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

18 pages, 7932 KiB  
Article
Segmentation and Stratification Methods of Field Maize Terrestrial LiDAR Point Cloud
by Chengda Lin, Fangzheng Hu, Junwen Peng, Jing Wang and Ruifang Zhai
Agriculture 2022, 12(9), 1450; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12091450 - 13 Sep 2022
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 2395
Abstract
Three-dimensional (3D) laser point cloud technology is an important research method in the field of agricultural remote sensing research. The collection and processing technology of terrestrial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point cloud of crops has greatly promoted the integration of agricultural informatization [...] Read more.
Three-dimensional (3D) laser point cloud technology is an important research method in the field of agricultural remote sensing research. The collection and processing technology of terrestrial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point cloud of crops has greatly promoted the integration of agricultural informatization and intelligence. In a smart farmland based on 3D modern agriculture, the manager can efficiently and conveniently achieve the growth status of crops through the point cloud collection system and processing model integrated in the smart agricultural system. To this end, we took field maize as the research object in this study and processed four sets of field maize point clouds, named Maize-01, Maize-02, Maize-03, and Maize-04, respectively. In this research, we established a field individual maize segmentation model with the density-based clustering algorithm (DBSCAN) as the core, and four groups of field maize were used as research objects. Among them, the value of the overall accuracy (OA) index, which was used to evaluate the comprehensive performance of the model, were 0.98, 0.97, 0.95, and 0.94. Secondly, the multi-condition identification method was used to separate different maize organ point clouds from the individual maize point cloud. In addition, the organ stratification model of field maize was established. In this organ stratification study, we take Maize-04 as the research object and obtained the recognition accuracy rates of four maize organs: tassel, stalk, ear, and leaf at 96.55%, 100%, 100%, and 99.12%, respectively. We also finely segmented the leaf organ obtained from the above-mentioned maize organ stratification model into each leaf individual again. We verified the accuracy of the leaf segmentation method with the leaf length as the representative. In the linear analysis of predicted values of leaf length, R2 was 0.73, RMSE was 0.12 m, and MAE was 0.07 m. In this study, we examined the segmentation of individual crop fields and established 3D information interpretations for crops in the field as well as for crop organs. Results visualized the real scene of the field, which is conducive to analyzing the response mechanism of crop growth and development to various complex environmental factors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

17 pages, 11854 KiB  
Article
Combination of Sentinel-2 Satellite Images and Meteorological Data for Crop Water Requirements Estimation in Intensive Agriculture
by Jaouad El Hachimi, Abderrazak El Harti, Rachid Lhissou, Jamal-Eddine Ouzemou, Mohcine Chakouri and Amine Jellouli
Agriculture 2022, 12(8), 1168; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12081168 - 05 Aug 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2005
Abstract
In arid and semi-arid regions, agriculture is an important element of the national economy, but this sector is a large consumer of water. In a context of high pressure on water resources, appropriate management is required. In semi-arid, intensive agricultural systems, such as [...] Read more.
In arid and semi-arid regions, agriculture is an important element of the national economy, but this sector is a large consumer of water. In a context of high pressure on water resources, appropriate management is required. In semi-arid, intensive agricultural systems, such as the Tadla irrigated perimeter in central Morocco, a large amount of water is lost by evapotranspiration (ET), and farmers need an effective decision support system for good irrigation management. The main objective of this study was to combine a high spatial resolution Sentinel-2 satellite and meteorological data for estimating crop water requirements in the irrigated perimeter of Tadla and qualifying its irrigation strategy. The dual approach of the FAO-56 (Food and Agriculture Organization) model, based on the modulation of evaporative demand, was used for the estimation of crop water requirements. Sentinel-2A temporal images were used for crop type mapping and deriving the basal crop coefficient (Kcb) based on NDVI data. Meteorological data were also used in crop water requirement simulation, using SAMIR (satellite monitoring of irrigation) software. The results allowed for the spatialization of crop water requirements on a large area of irrigated crops during the 2016–2017 agricultural season. In general, the crops’ requirement for water is at its maximum during the months of March and April, and the critical period starts from February for most crops. Maps of water requirements were developed. They showed the variability over time of crop development and their estimated water requirements. The results obtained constitute an important indicator of how water should be distributed over the area in order to improve the efficiency of the irrigation scheduling strategy. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

14 pages, 5472 KiB  
Article
Wheat Water Deficit Monitoring Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Backscattering Coefficient and Interferometric Coherence
by Meriem Barbouchi, Chayma Chaabani, Hatem Cheikh M’Hamed, Riadh Abdelfattah, Rachid Lhissou, Karem Chokmani, Nadhira Ben Aissa, Mohamed Annabi and Haithem Bahri
Agriculture 2022, 12(7), 1032; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12071032 - 15 Jul 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1793
Abstract
Due to the climate change situation, water deficit stress is becoming one of the main factors that threatens the agricultural sector in semi-arid zones. Thus, it is extremely important to provide efficient tools of water deficit monitoring and early detection. To do so, [...] Read more.
Due to the climate change situation, water deficit stress is becoming one of the main factors that threatens the agricultural sector in semi-arid zones. Thus, it is extremely important to provide efficient tools of water deficit monitoring and early detection. To do so, a set of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) backscattering and interferometric SAR (InSAR) Sentinel-1 data, covering the period from January to June 2016, are considered over a durum wheat field in Tunisia. We first studied the temporal variation of the InSAR coherence data and the SAR backscattering coefficient as a function of the phenological stage of the wheat. Subsequently, the parameters of the SAR and InSAR coherence images were analyzed with regard to the water stress coefficient and the wheat height variations. The main findings of this study highlight the high correlation (r = 0.88) that exists between the InSAR coherence and the water stress coefficient, on the one hand, and between the backscattering coefficient, the interferometric coherence, and the water deficit coefficient (R2 = 0.95 and RMSE = 14%), on the other hand. When a water deficit occurs, the water stress coefficient increases, the crop growth decreases, and the height variation becomes low, and this leads to the increase of the InSAR coherence value. In summary, the reliability of Sentinel-1 SAR and InSAR coherence data to monitor the biophysical parameters of the durum wheat was validated in the context of water deficits in semi-arid regions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

16 pages, 5046 KiB  
Article
AUTS: A Novel Approach to Mapping Winter Wheat by Automatically Updating Training Samples Based on NDVI Time Series
by Chunyang Wang, Huan Zhang, Xifang Wu, Wei Yang, Yanjun Shen, Bibo Lu and Jianlong Wang
Agriculture 2022, 12(6), 817; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture12060817 - 06 Jun 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1931
Abstract
Accurate and rapid access to crop distribution information is a significant requirement for the development of modern agriculture. Improving the efficiency of remote sensing monitoring of winter wheat planting area information, a new method of automatically updating training samples (AUTS), is proposed herein. [...] Read more.
Accurate and rapid access to crop distribution information is a significant requirement for the development of modern agriculture. Improving the efficiency of remote sensing monitoring of winter wheat planting area information, a new method of automatically updating training samples (AUTS), is proposed herein. Firstly, based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, a Sentinel-2 image with a spatial resolution of 10 m was selected to extract the distribution map of winter wheat in the city of Shijiazhuang in 2017. Secondly, combined with the NDVI time series, the weighted correlation coefficients from 2017, 2018, and 2019 were calculated. Then, the 2017 winter wheat distribution map and its most significant relevant areas were used to extract sample points from 2018 and 2019 automatically. Finally, the distribution map of winter wheat in Shijiazhuang in 2018 and 2019 was generated. In addition, to test the applicability of the automatically updating training sample at different scales and regions, the proposed method was applied to Landsat 8 image data with a spatial resolution of 30 m, as well as to Handan and Baoding. The results showed that the calculated winter wheat planting area is comparable with the officially published statistics, based on Sentinel-2, extracting three years of winter wheat, the R2 values for all three years were above 0.95. The R2 values for 2018 and 2019, based on Landsat 8 extractions, were 0.95 and 0.90, respectively. The R2 values extracted from Handan and Baoding in 2018 were 0.94 and 0.86, respectively. These results indicate that the proposed method has high accuracy and can provide technical support and reference for winter wheat area monitoring and yield estimation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Review

Jump to: Research

16 pages, 12439 KiB  
Review
State of Major Vegetation Indices in Precision Agriculture Studies Indexed in Web of Science: A Review
by Dorijan Radočaj, Ante Šiljeg, Rajko Marinović and Mladen Jurišić
Agriculture 2023, 13(3), 707; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13030707 - 18 Mar 2023
Cited by 22 | Viewed by 5124
Abstract
Vegetation indices provide information for various precision-agriculture practices, by providing quantitative data about crop growth and health. To provide a concise and up-to-date review of vegetation indices in precision agriculture, this study focused on the major vegetation indices with the criterion of their [...] Read more.
Vegetation indices provide information for various precision-agriculture practices, by providing quantitative data about crop growth and health. To provide a concise and up-to-date review of vegetation indices in precision agriculture, this study focused on the major vegetation indices with the criterion of their frequency in scientific papers indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) since 2000. Based on the scientific papers with the topic of “precision agriculture” combined with “vegetation index”, this study found that the United States and China are global leaders in total precision-agriculture research and the application of vegetation indices, while the analysis adjusted for the country area showed much more homogenous global development of vegetation indices in precision agriculture. Among these studies, vegetation indices based on the multispectral sensor are much more frequently adopted in scientific studies than their low-cost alternatives based on the RGB sensor. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was determined as the dominant vegetation index, with a total of 2200 studies since the year 2000. With the existence of vegetation indices that improved the shortcomings of NDVI, such as enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI), this study recognized their potential for enabling superior results to those of NDVI in future studies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Agro-Geoinformatics)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-7
Back to TopTop