Special Issue: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Optimize Irrigation and Crop Monitoring

With the increasing population, the demand for nourished food has increased constantly, which creates pressure on food producers and suppliers to avail good quality food in a sufficient amount to entire universe. Climatic condition, water supply (irrigation) and nutrients (fertilizer and pesticides) availability are three major factors that affect productivity of crop. With the increasing changes in of global warming and climatic condition invariable at same time, water and nutrients are becoming physically scarce due to growing multiple demands for water and fast exhausting of fossil fuels. To cope up with the scarcity of natural resources and improvement of crop production, it is necessary for the agricultural sector to adopt latest innovative aerial technologies to produce and satisfy the need of food nourishment while monitoring requirement of natural resources. Technological integration in smart agriculture not only helps in crop monitoring, and crop production tracking but also analysing several crop yielding operations like soil groundwork preparation, crop selection, seed collection, sowing of seed, crop growth and irrigation, soil fertilization, crop watering, harvesting etc. Emergent technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) can provide substantial potential in Smart agriculture and precision farming applications, allowing the acquisition of real-time ecological data. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is one of IoT device that can be used to exploit variety of agriculture-based applications relevant to crops monitoring, optimized irrigation and crop management by capturing temporal and high-spatial resolution images. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) integrates the concepts of information and communication technologies (ICT), robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data analytics to help farmers in various agricultural task like growth monitoring of the vegetation, monitor crop or vegetation healthiness and crop irrigation management as well as ensure healthy and nutritious crop yielding production. Agriculture based UAVs are extremely proficient, and their usage has extended across all fields of agriculture, including fertilizer and pesticide squirting, seed sowing, irrigation and crop growth monitoring and mapping. Consequently, the market for agriculture-based UAVs is likely to continue rising with the associated technologies. This special issue titled “Unmanned aerial vehicle for optimize irrigation and Crop Monitoring” provides emergent research discovering the hypothetical and real-world facets of critical technological explanations within the agriculture industry. This special issue focuses on introducing quality research that use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for efficient irrigation planning, monitoring crop production based on climatic condition and requirement of soil nutrients. We welcome qualitative research articles from researchers, academicians and industrial expert that address advancement in agricultural sector by introducing latest technology like robotic systems, machine learning, cloud computation and big data analytics, and observe the effects of UAV for crop monitoring and enhancing productivity.