Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can help farmers to monitor their crops and provide irrigation and inputs as and when the crops need, reducing risks to yields. This study uses UAV imagery to measure water and plant stress in the winter wheat fields, lying in high, medium and low Desertification Vulnerability Indexed (DVI) zones of South Punjab, a region that has an agrarian economy subject to severe desertification. UAV flights were conducted in nine wheat fields in three districts of Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan and Rajanpur. Flights were operated at 15 m altitude above ground level at midday, February 2019, presenting good resolution images of 30.48ppi, in RGB, with a pixel depth of 16 Bit, from a DJI Phantom 3 Standard quadcopter. Dronedeploy was used for image pre-processing and generating orthomosaics of the nine fields. Orthomosaics were uploaded on the Agremo app, where water stress and plant stress analysis of the sampled fields was performed. Agremo generated maps were reclassified in Arc Map 10.5. Fatehpur Union Council, lying in the High DVI zone, was found to suffer most severe plant stress, potential plant stress, and water stress with 34.83%, 51.16% and 42.35% of the crop affected respectively. The sample fields in high DVI zones in two of the three study districts suffered the highest amounts of plant stress and water stress. The conclusions offer guidance to policy makers on where water redistribution may need to be considered so that exacerbating desertification risk can be avoided, particularly in the most vulnerable zones.
Nausheen Mazhar, Safdar A. Shirazi. (2021) USING UAV IMAGERY TO MEASURE PLANT AND WATER STRESS IN WINTER WHEAT FIELDS OF DRYLANDS, SOUTH PUNJAB, PAKISTAN, Pakistan Journal of Agricultural Sciences, Volume 58, Issue 3.
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