Dear Colleagues,
Sensors and technologies involving sensors in agriculture and forestry play an important role today. In agriculture and silviculture, as a branch of forestry, the need for increasing the production and simultaneously the efforts for minimizing the environmental impact and for saving costs make the sensor systems the best allied tool. The use of sensors helps to exploit all available resources appropriately and to apply hazardous products moderately. When nutrients in the soil, humidity, solar radiation, density of weeds and all factors affecting the production are known, this gets better and the use of chemical products such as fertilizers, herbicides and other pollution products can be reduced considerably. These activities fall inside the emerging area known as Precision Agriculture. In forest management, which can be considered a branch of forestry, a lot of number of activities is oriented towards wood production or forest inventories with the aims of controlling parameters of interest such as diameter of trees, height, crown height, bark thickness and other variables, such as canopy, humidity, illumination, CO2 transformation, where the social acceptation is of interest.
The use of unmanned aerial or ground vehicles (UAVs and UGVs), equipped with a set of sensors, has experimented an important growing during the last years to carry out the tasks involved in the above processes and also for autonomous navigation on the specific agricultural and forestry environments. But also traditional crewed vehicles are sensorized conveniently with same purpose.
Additionally, during the post-production process, including transportation, storage, packing, selection, classification or distribution among others, the use of sensors is of vital importance for minimizing costs and negative environmental impact allowing saving energy or minimizing the application of chemical products.
A list of sensors covering the above topics, but are not limited, is the following: biological (including chemical and gas analyzers), water sensors, meteorological sensors, weed seekers, optical cameras, Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), photometric sensors, soil respiration or moisture, photosynthesis sensors, Leaf Area index (LAI) sensors, range finders, Dendrometers, hygrometers.
This Topical Collection covers the following topics related to the above sensors:
- Sensors devices capabilities, materials and technologies
- Applications and problems addressed
- Sensors domain-oriented devices and methods used for processing the data sensed
Prof. Dr. Gonzalo Pajares Martinsanz
Collection Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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