Sugarcane proximal sensing: agronomic variables and soil spectroscopy

Abstract

Site-specific management of agricultural fields, which is the main precision agriculture precept, is essential to optimize sugarcane crop exploitation. Field spatial variability characterization is performed mostly based on manual and laborious sampling procedures hindering precision agriculture adoption. Thus, several technologies have been developed to assist on such variability identification. Among the possibilities, proximal sensing of both soil and plant shows great potential. This research project has as the main goal evaluating proximal sensing techniques for agronomic properties characterization that must be determinant to sugarcane production, focusing on precision agriculture practices. To this end, this project is divided in two main objectives: 1) evaluation of spectroscopy techniques for soil characterization, regarding mainly on soil parameters related to its chemical fertility, aiming variable-rate fertilization; 2) infer which agronomic variables spatially impair sugarcane yield, evaluating potential techniques to such investigation. With this study is expected to allow proposing alternative techniques to the traditional soil wet chemical analyses for fertilizer recommendation as well as build up information to growers regarding which cropping variables must be spatially monitored in order to allow proper sugarcane site-specific management. (AU)