Remote sensing for crop residue cover recognition: A review

Abstract

Nowadays, using of conservation tillage instead of conventional tillage has been changing attitudes from conventional agriculture to sustainable agriculture. The tillage method affects directly soil and water quality. Actions relative to optimized agricultural management such as conservation tillage methods has adopted at recent years by agronomists and agricultures, due to agricultural and environment advantages. These advantages consist of soil and water quality improving, wind and water erosion prevention, evaporation reduction, soil surface temperature reduction, greenhouse gases reduction, fuel consumption reduction, and etc. In conversation tillage, more than 30% agricultural production residues remain on the ground. For evaluation of residues cover in the fields, information of crop residue obtain from line-transect method. This method has great accuracy, but it is very time consuming and costly for large areas. Remote sensing using satellite information processing can help the researchers to gather the data from the field and the extraction the information. Tillage indices and textural features are two most applicable approach in remote sensing crop residue cover assessment. The aim of this paper was to study of conservation tillage advantages and remote sensing methods to residue cover crop measurement at vast regions through satellite imagery.