Scientific Publication

Mapping and monitoring of food legumes and dryland cereal production systems

Abstract

Mapping and monitoring of the agricultural production systems on a regular interval provide important&#xA;spatial matrix on the status, trend, and options for effective intervention at multiple scales. The recent&#xA;advances in agrogeoinformatics&#xA;bigdata&#xA;enriched with increasing openaccess&#xA;protocols become an&#xA;integral part of solving the food security equation. This paper demonstrates use of an integrated earth&#xA;observation system (EOS) for mapping and monitoring major agricultural production systems. The&#xA;approach uses multitemporal&#xA;and multiscale&#xA;remote sensing data coupled with insitu&#xA;observation to&#xA;map the legume and cereal production systems. The support vector machine (SVM) classification was&#xA;found to be the best with overall classification accuracy of 82%. The insitu&#xA;data on crop grain and&#xA;straw yields were measured using nested sampling approach. The best fit equation of yield values were&#xA;regressed with remote sensing indices (NDVI and EVI). The significant correlation (R ) value of cereal&#xA;and lentil crop were 0.74 and 6.9 at p<;0.01 respectively. The R value between observed yield and&#xA;predicted yield was 0.80 and 0.97 in cereal and lentil crops respectively. The predicted yield based on&#xA;remote sensing data varies from 3,303 to 5,710 kg ha and mean yield is 3,840 kg ha . The&#xA;productivity of the cereal crop was varies from 4228 kg ha to 4598 kg ha while lentil crop was&#xA;between 304 to 1,500 kg ha . The huge inter and intra field variably was observed through the study&#xA;areas. Such information yielded vital information about yield gaps exists within and across the fields.&#xA;Study is in progress to develop systematic and semiautomated&#xA;algorithms to map and monitor the&#xA;agricultural production on regular interval to quantify the changes in the cropping pattern, rotation,&#xA;production and impacts of the technological interventions and exante&#xA;analysis