Remote sensing applied to precision agriculture and malherbology

This Research Group is formed by personnel from the Institute of Sustainable Agriculture and the Dept. of Engineering Graphics and Geomatics of the University of Cordoba.
Our objective is to develop and transfer innovative and efficient strategies to improve agricultural management, making it more effective and sustainable through a rationalized use of phytosanitary products (herbicides and foliar applications) while maintaining an optimal level of control, avoiding the appearance of resistance and respecting the balance between productive agriculture and environmental requirements. As an example, we have demonstrated that herbicide applications can be reduced by up to 70% in crops such as corn, wheat, sunflower or vineyards.
In our research we seek to provide knowledge for a reduction in the use of phytosanitary products through localized management according to the real needs of herbaceous and woody crops. Another line of work deals with the generation of procedures to optimize agronomic activities with high expenditure of economic resources (human, time) such as high yield phenotyping of varieties (e.g. olive, almond) including different cropping systems (intensive, hedgerow) and irrigated vs. rainfed.
We integrate technological tools (images in different spectral range and LiDAR data from UAV-borne sensors, ground sensors), agronomic tools (e.g. agro-ecology of weeds, pruning types, porosity, leaf area and crown architecture in woody crops, crop estimation, among others), computational tools (object-based image analysis-OBIA, Data Mining, Machine Learning and Deep Learning) and photogrammetry.