The amount of solar energy absorbed by plants is largely a function of the foliar concentration of photosynthetic pigments. Consequently, low concentrations of chlorophyll can directly limit the photosynthetic potential and thus the primary production of plants. This study describes a non[1]destructive method aiming to estimate the chlorophyll concentrations on potato leaves from the cultivars SA–2563, Pumamaqui and Purranca. This method is based on the interaction between light and vegetation and uses the first derivative of spectral reflectance from the crop canopy. For reference, we used the SPAD units obtained with a previously validated SPAD–502 chlorophyll meter. We found correlations greater than 90% between the amplitudes of signals obtained by deriving the spectral reflectance of leaves at wavelength about 720 nm and the chlorophyll concentrations obtained by the SPAD–502....

Soil moisture content can be used to predict drought impact on agricultural yield better than precipitation. Remote sensing is viable source of soil moisture data in instrument-scarce areas. However, space-based soil moisture estimates lack suitability for daily and high-resolution agricultural, hydrological, and environmental applications. This study aimed to assess the potential of the random forest machine learning technique to enhance the spatial resolution of remote soil moisture products from the SMAP satellite. Models were built using random forest for spatial downscaling of SMAP-L3-E, then visually and statistically evaluated for disaggregation quality. The impact of topography, soil properties, and precipitation on the downscaled soil moisture was examined. The relationship between downscaled soil moisture and in-situ soil moisture was analyzed. The results indicate that the pro...

Accurate determination of plant water status is mandatory to optimize irrigation scheduling and thus maximize yield. Infrared thermography (IRT) can be used as a proxy for detecting stomatal closure as a measure of plant water stress. In this study, an open-source software (Thermal Image Processor (TIPCIP)) that includes image processing techniques such as thermal-visible image segmentation and morphological operations was developed to estimate the crop water stress index (CWSI) in potato crops. Results were compared to the CWSI derived from thermocouples where a high correlation was found ( = 0.84). To evaluate the effectiveness of the software, two experiments were implemented. TIPCIP-based canopy temperature was used to estimate CWSI throughout the growing season, in a humid environment. Two treatments with different irrigation timings were established based on CWSI thresholds: 0.4 (T...

Potatoes—a global food security and staple crop—is threatened by dry spells in drought-prone areas. The use of physiological thresholds to save water while maintaining a reasonable tuber yield has been proposed, but their effects on physiological performances and usefulness under different irrigation methods are yet to be evaluated. In this study, photosynthetic traits were monitored to assess the effect of water restriction and rewatering under drip (DI) and furrow (FI) irrigations. The treatments consisted of two maximum light-saturated stomatal conductance (g_) irrigation thresholds (T2: 0.15 and T3: 0.05 mol H2O m−2 s−1) compared with a fully irrigated control (g_ > 0.3 mol H2O m−2 s−1). DI used less water than FI but promoted early senescence and low percentage of maximum assimilation rate (PMA) at late developmental stages. FI caused no yield penalization in T2 and high...

The spatial heterogeneity of soil properties has a significant impact on crop growth, making it difficult to adopt site-specific crop management practices. Traditional laboratory-based analyses are costly, and data extrapolation for mapping soil properties using high-resolution imagery becomes a computationally expensive procedure, taking days or weeks to obtain accurate results using a desktop workstation. To overcome these challenges, cloud-based solutions such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) have been used to analyze complex data with machine learning algorithms. In this study, we explored the feasibility of designing and implementing a digital soil mapping approach in the GEE platform using high-resolution reflectance imagery derived from a thermal infrared and multispectral camera Altum (MicaSense, Seattle, WA, USA). We compared a suite of multispectral-derived soil and vegetation indi...