I’m happy to have taught and coordinated another session of the Remote Sensing for Plant Health course for the EU Better Training for Safer Food initiative. This year the course featured a stronger UAV (drone) focus, with extensive hands-on demonstrations of aerial sampling of plant material, automated missions and hyper-spectral hardware setups.
In addition, the basic theoretical background of remote sensing was provided including an understanding of the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum in the visible and near-infrared and its relation to vegetation indices.
Proximal remote sensing can bridge the gap between individual plants and landscape wide measurements, providing continuous data at a high-spatiotemporal resolution, enabling us to address key ecological questions unanswerable from space-based observations alone.
A new paper summarizes methods, data sources and proximal remote applications. It gives guidance on best practices and valuable directions for future research.
We provide protocol development and data processing expertise in support of this IFPRI led project to mitigate basic risk in smallholder farmer insurance.