Context
In a context of smart farming and precision agriculture, a way to improve potato nitrogen fertilization is to split nitrogen fertilisers application and to adapt the in-season recommendation by a crop nitrogen status monitoring. Amongst other, Sentinel-2 satellites offer free imagery at an interesting spatial (ten meters) and temporal (five days) resolutions to do this monitoring at field scale.
Objectives
The objective of the STARGATE project is to contribute to the development of an operational in-season nitrogen recommendation tool based on Sentinel-2 data and on the nitrogen nutrition index plant-based method. The NNI method is based on the concept of the dilution curve describing the critical nitrogen concentration in the whole plant as a function of the total crop biomass.
The project will more specifically explore the potentialities of Sentinel-2 for retrieving crop nitrogen status (based on biomass N concentration) and the biomass production during the vegetative phase which are key parameters to compute the NNI and subsequently to provide a nitrogen recommendation. The study will rely on field data collected in the frame of the BELCAM project during 3 growing seasons (2017-2019).
Expected results
The main deliverable of the STARGATE project is a peer-reviewed article relative to the assessment of Sentinel 2 performances to retrieve the in-season potato crop nitrogen status and biomass. The developed methodology will be also integrated within the BELCAM web-platform.
Financement
- BELSPO
