Operational monitoring of crop condition with unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

The algorithm for monitoring and forecasting yields using unmanned aerial vehicles when building electronic maps for differentiated crop sowing is studied and proposed. The development and testing of the technology of differentiated seed placement was carried out over 4 years from 2022 through 2025 in 8 fields of maize and sunflower crops of the agricultural enterprise OOO Zolotaya Osen of the Aleyskiy District. The farm is located in the Prialeiskaya soil and climatic zone, and it operates according to classical subsurface tillage technique. The yield formula was evaluated, the relationships of the average grain weight in anthodium and the number of seedlings and the average moisture storage in a meter-deep soil layer on the studied crops were revealed. The detection of signs of moisture deficit in the fields was carried out by determining the S2WI index and by the ground methods. On the developed maps, the stability zones of the soil contours reach 50% and above. It has been revealed that the moisture content of the soil is an important and limiting factor in the development of agrocenoses. As a part of the conducted field experiment with a variable seeding rate depending on the zones of soil fertility, orthophotoplans of monitoring fields were prepared for all stages of the ontogenetic development of crops during the growing season. The developed maps with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) index (range from -1 to 1) showed detailed information about the condition of plants. Operational monitoring of the crop condition using unmanned aerial vehicles made it possible to control the stages of growth, crop development, crop density, and the effectiveness of agricultural machinery and the control of technological operations with the differentiated approach.