Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers transformed agriculture as we know it during the Green Revolution, catapulting crop yields and food security to new heights, reports Ohio’s Country Journal. Yet, despite improvements in crop nitrogen use efficiency, fears of underperformance spur fertilizer overapplication to this day. Excess nitrogen then ends up in waterways, including groundwater, and in the atmosphere in the form of potent greenhouse gases.
Predicting the amount of nitrogen needed by a particular crop in a particular year is tricky. The first step is understanding crop nitrogen status in real time, but it’s neither realistic nor scalable to measure leaf nitrogen by hand throughout the course of a season.
In a first-of-its-kind study, a University of Illinois research team put hyperspectral sensors on planes to quickly and accurately detect nitrogen status and photosynthetic capacity in corn.
“Field nitrogen measurements are very time- and labor-consuming, but the airplane hyperspectral sensing technique allows us to scan the fields very fast, at a few seconds per acre. It also provides much higher spectral and spatial resolution than similar studies using satellite imagery,” said Sheng Wang, research assistant professor in the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at U of I. Wang is lead author on the study.
Read more at Ohio’s Country Journal.
