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Sensor-Based Monitoring of Soil and Crop Health for Enhancing Input Use Efficiency

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Food, Energy, and Water Nexus

Abstract

Indian agriculture has overemphasized enhancing crop production for the ever-growing food demands of the nation through a singular focus on the overuse of required resources (i.e., water, nutrients, pesticides, etc.) to harness the potential of the new improved cultivars. Thereby, this trend of agricultural practice over the years resulted in fatigue in soil health and stagnation in the production system. To sustain food production and counter impending environmental and economic consequences of indiscriminate use of fertilizers and other ecologically unfriendly agronomic interventions, rapid appraisal of soil and crop health at the field scale and the subsequent issuance of advisories to the stakeholders require immediate attention. Recent developments in sensor and geospatial technologies enable us to capture reliable spatiotemporal information on soil and crop health for variable and efficient input management system as opposed to the “uniform” treatment underlying traditional management systems. The philosophy involves matching resource application and agronomic practices with soil properties and crop requirements as they vary across a site. This chapter describes the success stories of employing sensor-based tools and technologies to assess inherent and management variabilities of fields, crop, and environment in spatiotemporal scale, respectively. GPS-guided soil sampling, hyperspectral remote sensing integrated with geostatistical techniques in a GIS environment could be used to generate spatially variable soil fertility maps and homogenous units for recommending site-specific nutrient management. Possible use of remote sensing, both multispectral and hyperspectral sensors at satellite, airborne and ground-based platforms has been explored for crop and soil discrimination and mapping, retrieval of crop biophysical parameters through radiative transfer modeling, monitoring biotic and abiotic stress, and development of crop health index for crop growth monitoring in spatiotemporal scale. These products can further be used in developing decision rules for various input applications for better crop growth and optimization of yield. Keeping in view, young educated farming community enabled with Internet and mobile technology, there is great hope of acceptance of sensor-based monitoring and advisory system for sustainable enhanced production system.

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Sahoo, R.N. (2022). Sensor-Based Monitoring of Soil and Crop Health for Enhancing Input Use Efficiency. In: Ray, C., Muddu, S., Sharma, S. (eds) Food, Energy, and Water Nexus. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85728-8_7

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