Farmers are set to benefit from research led by Earth observation scientists at the University of Edinburgh and NCEO to enhance sustainable and efficient production of two important UK food crops: wheat and potatoes.
The joint BBSRC and NERC grant awarded last month (21st July) for the collaborative research project totals £1 million. It will enable scientists to work with farmers and end users on a new tool that combines novel sensing and diagnostic techniques to identify the crops’ stress response when they lack water and key nutrients.
Changing climate, variable yields, and resource constraints are challenging UK agriculture and global food security.
The tool will support decision-making with near real-time maps of crop stress, from sub-field to farm scale, providing estimates of the likely impact on crop yield, as well as the best management interventions to support a high yield using precision agriculture.
Professor Mathew Williams, an environmental change ecologist at the University of Edinburgh-NCEO, says, “We will test remote sensing technologies and couple them with methods for analysing crop and soil processes.”
“There is much concern currently about why farm yields have stagnated or become highly variable between seasons. Within the UK there is a lot of yield variation across farms too. We need to understand why and how to solve these problems, and new technology provides a means to do this”.
The team will deploy sensors at farm sites on fixed towers, as well as on unmanned aerial vehicles, and compare these data against data from satellite sensors with global coverage.
They will then evaluate whether changes in leaf temperature, fluorescence and reflectance are related to yield reductions, comparing sensor data against field measurements of plant growth, yield and ecophysiology, and plant and soil temperature and moisture.
The scientists will work closely with farmers to determine how this information can benefit them most effectively.
“We aim to find out how, and under what circumstances, sensors and platforms can be employed to determine and diagnose crop yield limits,” says Williams. “We hope to improve on the simulations of the plant-soil system, and develop forecasts of its sensitivity to management changes using more reliable, near real-time and robust analyses.”
Image: Wheat at Paston, UK; credit: Colin