Research Scientist Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
From the past few years, the remote sensing technology has been widely used in Precision Agriculture and High-throughput Plant Phenotyping. The conventional techniques for crop scouting are usually time-consuming, labor-intensive, destructive and expensive. The traditional methods used in agronomic crop management are being replaced by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based digital technologies which are playing a key role in reducing farm labors and increasing productivity. The novel hyperspectral imaging (HSI) includes the physical concept of imaging and spectroscopy that collects abundant information in hundreds of images at different wavelengths. This presentation is mainly focused to share the pathway on the development of digital agriculture tools using advanced sensing systems in controlled and field environment. The proximal and UAV/drone based high-throughput aerial imaging has been used to study canola, lentils and cereal crop phenomics. The presentation will include various research studies focused on prairies crop phenomics and plants health detection (biotic and abiotic stresses). It will also include radiometric and spectral calibration of UAV dataset. The case study involve different canola genotypes seedpods maturity and shattering problem; nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) in canola varieties; wheat cultivars phenotyping and yield prediction strategies using machine learning and statistical models; assessment of wheat stripe-rust in a nursery; evaluating different herbicides responses to dry down the lentils; detecting herbicide resistance in Kochia; advance monitoring of wireworm using overhead imagery.
