Agrotechnology

Remote sensing tools used to adapt agriculture to future scenarios of water scarcity in orchards and vineyards

7^th Global Summit on Agriculture & Horticulture

October 17-19, 2016 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Samuel Ortega-Farias

University of Talca, Chile

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Agrotechnol

Abstract:

In the world, water availability for irrigation has been reduced in the last years due to frequent drought and competition for water resources among agriculture, industry and urban area. For these reasons, the drip irrigation system has been widely adopted by farmers to optimize water application in new plantations of orchards and vineyards. However, drip-irrigated vineyards and orchards require a correct irrigation scheduling in order to maintain existing production levels and fruit quality. A key to achieve these targets is the accurate estimation of crop water requirements or actual evapotranspiration (ETa). In this regard, remote sensing tools have been found to be useful to estimate ETa at regional and field scales while using satellite images. Also, modern optical remote sensors aboard an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) provide the basis for the generation of remote sensing images which have been used to compute ETa at high spatial resolution. In this regard, the presentation will describe the application of METRIC (mapping evapotranspiration at high resolution with internalized calibration) model to estimate crop water requirements or Eta, using multispectral and thermal images obtained from Landsat satellite. Results indicated that METRIC was able to generate ETa maps that have been used for optimizing irrigation management at regional and farm levels. Also, the presentation will describe the potential use of multispectral and thermal cameras placed on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to estimate orchard and vineyard water requirements at very high spatial resolution (6 cmx6 cm). Results demonstrated that remote sensors placed on an UAV may provide an excellent tool to evaluate the effect of spatial variability of soil and canopy size on the estimation of canopy transpiration and soil evaporation.

Biography :

Email: sortega@utalca.cl