Preharvest Monitoring of Biomass Production - Engineering and Science of Biomass Feedstock Production and Provision - page 58

Chapter 4
Preharvest Monitoring of Biomass Production
Liujun Li , Lei Tian , and Tofael Ahamed
Abstract Preharvest monitoring of biomass production is necessary to develop
optimized instrumentation and data processing systems for crop growth, health, and
stress monitoring and to develop algorithms for fi eld operation scheduling. Some
research questions of specifi c interest are as follows: (1) What are the major crop
sensing needs for energy crop health monitoring and productivity improvement? (2)
Which sensor/platform should be used for the fi eld data collection? (3) What is the
best process for energy crop data-to-knowledge conversion? In this chapter, we fi rst
review the basics of remote sensing and its application to energy crops. We then
discuss the development of three near-real-time remote sensing systems, namely, a
stand-alone tower-based remote sensing system, close proximity data collection
vehicle, and an unmanned aerial vehicle-based remote sensing system to monitor
crop growth. The physical status of crop growth and biomass accumulation was
projected over the growing seasons. The remote sensing systems included multi-
spectral camera, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), and a global position system
sensor. The sensing systems were convenient to perform site-specifi c monitoring of
bioenergy crops and collect data in near real time including ground reference infor-
mation. These nondestructive measurements included bioenergy crop growth moni-
toring using typical vegetation index and estimation of biomass yield by correlating
it with suitable vegetation index. The fi eld experimental data has been presented to
correlate with remote sensing data. To understand the crop growth status over the
growing season, the remote sensing data could be correlated with ground truth data
to develop a model for predicting dry matter biomass.