Geoinformatics for

Agriculture and Forestry

Course Instructor : G.DEVI.B.E (Civil), M.Tech (Remote Sensing), (Ph.D)

Assistant Professor, Dept.Of Civil Engineering
Anna University Tirunelveli Region.
India: Rich in Natural and Human Resources
3.27 M sq km Geographical Area

2400x(240-320) km2of Indo-Gangetic plains

>47000 species of flora & >89000 species of

fauna

1.41M sq km Net Sown Area

1.2 B Population

Rainfall : 88 cm6.51

20.64 % Forest Cover

>7500 km long Coastline

6.51 M tonnes of fish production

Remote sensing & GIS in Agriculture
 Agricultural products from crops form a large part of every person´s diet.
 Producing food of sufficient quantity and quality is essential for the well-
being of the people anywhere in the world.
 Agricultural plants, as living organisms, require water and nutrients in
order to grow and are sensitive to extreme weather phenomena, diseases
and pests.
 Remote sensing can provide data that help to identify and monitor crops.
 When these data are organised in a Geographical Information System
(GIS)along with other types of data, they become an important tool that
helps in making decisions about crops and agricultural strategies.
Who needs remote sensing for agriculture?
 National goverments can use remote sensing data, in order to
make important decisions about the policies they will adopt, or
how to tackle national issues regarding agriculture.
 Individual farmers can also receive useful information from
remote sensing images, when dealing with their individual crops,
about their health status and how to deal with any problems.
 Indian Agriculture

Net Area Sown : 141.6 Mha (43%)

Food grain production: 252 Mt
• (Kharif: 128 Mt, Rabi: 124 Mt)

Horticulture Production: 281 Mt

Net Irrigated Area: 65.3 Mha

(46.4%)
Agrl. Share of GDP(%): 13.9

Average Field size: 1.15 ha

Employment Opportunity: 54.6%

 you will learn...
 ... how vegetation interacts with electromagnetic radiation

 ... the methods of processing remote sensing data that provide

information about crop plants

 how to identify problems with the crops with remote sensing

 about the possibilities of combining remote sensing and GIS.

FACTS
 Did you know that 820 million people in developing
countries suffer from hunger and malnutrition because of
rainfall shortage and poor soil quality?
 Drought is caused when it is not raining a lot, and when it
does, the rain is very strong.
 Strong rain cannot be absorbed by the soil fast enough.
The result is that the soil is drying up and becomes
unsuitable for growing crops that can be used to feed the
people.
 Agricultural Applications of Remote Sensing
 Crop Type Identification and Acreage Estimation
 Crop Condition Assessment
 Crop Yield estimation
 Crop Production Forecasting
 Horticulture Development
 Sustainable Agriculture
 Climate Change
 Disaster (Drought & Flood)
 Soil Resources and mapping of soil characteristics
 Mapping of Soil management Practises
 Fishery
 Watershed Development
 Irrigation Management
  Factors affecting crop spectral
signatures
 Plants have a particular way to reflect the
electromagnetic radiation.
 This unique characteristic is known as the
vegetation's spectral signature.
 Reflectance of vegetation is very low in the blue and
red regions of the electromagnetic spectrum,
slightly higher in the green region and high in the
near infra-red.
 The normal growth process of a plant can be
disrupted when it goes through a stress period.
 When in stress, the plant is not functioning properly
because of one or more causes.
 When a plant is stressed, it usually expresses certain
visible symptoms, but also some that are not visible
to the human eye. Stress symptoms may appear in
all of the plants of the field or in some portions of Figure : Cellular leaf structure and its interaction
the field, depending on the cause. with electromagnetic energy. Most visible light is
absorbed, while almost half of the near infrared
energy is reflected.
 Vegetation Spectral Signature
 Vegetation covers a large portion of the Earth's land
surface.
 It's role on the regulation of the global temperature,
absorption of CO2 and other important functions, make it a
land cover type of great significance and interest.
 Remote sensing can take advantage of the particular
manner that vegetation reflects the incident
electromagnetic energy and obtain information about the
vegetation.
 Under the upper epidermis (the thin layer of cells that
forms the top surface of the leaf) there are primarily two
layers of cells.
 The top one is the pallisade parenchyma and consists of
elongated cells, tightly arranged in a vertical manner. In
this layer resides most of the chlorophyll, a protein that is
responsible for capturing the solar energy and power the
process of photosynthesis.
 The lower level is the spongy parenchyma, consisting of
irregularly shaped cells, with a lot of air spaces between
them, in order to allow the circulation of gases.
 In addition to chlorophyll, the pallisade parenchyma contains other
pigments, such as carotenoids, anthocyanin and others, which are
also responsible for the absorption of light.
 Because of those pigments, most of the visible electromagnetic
energy is absorbed, especially in the blue and red region.
 Absorption in the green regions is slightly weaker, which is why
vegetation appears green to our eyes.
 As a result, very little energy escapes the pallisade parenchyma and is
reflected back towards the sky. On the other hand, near infrared (NIR)
energy is not affected by those pigments and almost completely
penetrates the pallisade parenchyma.
 When it reaches the spongy parenchyma, the presence of air spaces
causes the refraction of the NIR energy in various directions.
 This results in approximately half the energy exiting the leaf from the
lower epidermis and the other half from the top epidermis, towards
the sky.
 Remote sensors that record the reflected energy
in the visible and near-infrared regions of the
spectrum, will record a very weak signal in the
blue and red regions, slightly stronger in the green
and very strong in the near-infrared.
 The combination of low visible reflectance and
high near-infrared reflectance is unique for most
vegetation types and that is why it is known as the
vegetation spectral signature.

Figure : Vegetation spectral

signature. Vegetation has low
reflectance in the visible region
and high reflectance in the near
infrared.
 Crop Identification
Why do we need to identify crops?
 It is very important for a national goverment to know
what crops the country is going to produce in the
current growing season.
 This knowledge has financial benefits for the country,
as it allows the budget planning for importing and
exporting of food products.
 One method is for someone to travel around the
country and see what crop is grown in each field. But
this takes too much time and costs a lot of money.
 Look at the image above.
 You can see fields containing various vegetables.
 What characteristics will you be looking for in order to
tell which crop is in each field?

Fields in a row, containing various vegetables.

Source: Wikimedia Commons
 Cadastral Mapping
 By observing the various kinds of crops, it is possible to map
the boundaries of the fields.

 Mapping of the boundaries of land parcels provides

information for the creation of cadastral maps.

 Cadastral maps are usually in a vector format and in this form

can be used in a GIS system, along with other types of data
(ownership, crop types cultivated etc.).

 These can be used by the local and national authorities, to

estimate how much land is used for agriculture, and how much
area is used for the cultivation of each crop.

 How can we identify crop types with remote sensing?

 How can we identify crop types with remote sensing?
Here is an example: Simply by looking at the satellite image below, we can
make some distinctions between the crops grown in different fields.
Even though vegetation is green in general, different species have variable "shades"
of green. These "shades" also change as the plants grow, mature and wilt.
The different shades of green are not easy to distinguish with the naked eye though.
 The two images below show a part of the original big image.
Can you find where this area is on the original image?
 Vegetation in general has low reflectance in
the visible region (what we see with our
eyes), and only a small amount of green
energy is not absorbed. On the other hand, it
has much higher reflectance in the near
infrared region.

The small image on the left is how the naked eye would see it (and it is called true colour). The
one on the right shows what it would look like if we could see in the infra-red (called a false
colour image).

The true colour image appears to have a uniform green colour. However, when we look at the
false colour image we can see that the field shown in the central part of the image is actually
seperated in two sections that have a different shade of red in the second image.

The reason why the two sections of the field look different is because they have different near
infrared reflectance.
Remote Sensing data required for crop identification
 So how can we be sure that the different near-infrared
reflectance between two fields is because the fields are
used to cultivate different crops?
 In order to identify a particular crop, we need to be
familiar with its growth cycle (germination, growth,
pollination, senescence).
 Some crops last for a couple of months, other need more
than 6 months to complete their growth.
 In addition we need to know in advance, how the crops
reflect the near-infrared at each of their various growth
stages.
 The two false colour images above, are showing the same
fields in Belgium at two different periods, May and
August.
 Within each field the signal is relatively similar,
suggesting that a single crop is being used in each field
If we compare the same fields in the two images, we can see that in some cases the
signal is different.

Fields that appear red (high near-infrared reflectance) are full of vegetation, whereas
those that appear blue (low near-infrared reflectance) either have very little or no
vegetation at all. In that case the recorded signal is originating from the ground.

Having the knowledge of when each crop is planted and harvested, we can estimate the
percentage of vegetation cover through the growth period, assuming no external factors
(stress, disease, etc.) affect its growth.

With this knowledge and by studying two or more images from the same growth period,
we can look at the multispectral reflectance signal at each growth stage and identify
what crops are grown in each field.
 By looking at the near infrared we can tell if there are a lot of plants in a field or
not.
 Combining this information with the knowledge of when each crop type
germinates, grows and is harvested, we can use two or more images from one
year to identify the crop type, simply by seeing how much growth there is at each
time the images were taken.

Creating maps of crop types

 By combining the different bands of satellite images taken at different dates, it is
possible to classify every pixel of the image and assign it to a crop type. This
process of assignment is called image classification.
 It is a very time-consuming task, requiring many calculations. Fortunately, image
processing software are equipped with algorithms that can deal with this
workload.
 The software takes into account all the available bands, groups pixels with similar
"spectral signatures" in the same class, and then uses the vegetation cover
information to identify the crop types
 The result of such a classification can be seen on the
image on the right. For this particular example data
from a sensor called AVIRIS were used. These data were
collected while the sensor was mounted on an aircraft
(not a satellite). Airborne data have the advantage of
high spatial resolution (usually around 1 metre for each Image classification showing the
pixel) and airborne sensors usually have many bands. In various crop types. Source: U.S.
addition it is up to the user to choose when the data will Geological Survey
be collected (as opposed to the satellites, which usually
have a very fixed orbit plan).

Part of the San Luis valley. View from

satellite (true colour image).Source: