Using a Mobile Device "App" and Proximal Remote Sensing Technologies to Assess Soil Cover Fractions on Agricultural Fields

Sensors
Ahmed LaamraniPamela Joosse

Abstract

Quantifying the amount of crop residue left in the field after harvest is a key issue for sustainability. Conventional assessment approaches (e.g., line-transect) are labor intensive, time-consuming and costly. Many proximal remote sensing devices and systems have been developed for agricultural applications such as cover crop and residue mapping. For instance, current mobile devices (smartphones & tablets) are usually equipped with digital cameras and global positioning systems and use applications (apps) for in-field data collection and analysis. In this study, we assess the feasibility and strength of a mobile device app developed to estimate crop residue cover. The performance of this novel technique (from here on referred to as "app" method) was compared against two point counting approaches: an established digital photograph-grid method and a new automated residue counting script developed in MATLAB at the University of Guelph. Both photograph-grid and script methods were used to count residue under 100 grid points. Residue percent cover was estimated using the app, script and photograph-grid methods on 54 vertical digital photographs (images of the ground taken from above at a height of 1.5 m) collected from eighteen...Continue Reading

References

Apr 6, 2006·Psychological Methods·Michael Smithson, Jay Verkuilen
Nov 17, 2006·Environmental Monitoring and Assessment·D Terrance BoothRobert D Berryman
Sep 11, 2007·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Pete SmithJo Smith
Jul 16, 2008·Scientific American·David R Huggins, John P Reganold

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Software Mentioned

Android tablet
FieldTRAKS Solutions
FieldTRAKS
©FieldTRAKS
photograph
Adobe PhoneGap
grid
FieldTRAKS App
script
Crop Residue Estimator app

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