Francisca López Granados

REMOTE SENSING AND PRECISION AGRICULTURE: SUSTAINABLE USE OF PHYTOSANITARY PRODUCTS

My research is aimed at a rational, integrated and sustainable management of the use of phytosanitary products, mainly using remote sensing techniques. Our purpose is to supply and transfer scientific and technological knowledge for the design of localized applications at plot scale according to real crop needs. The overall objectives are:

1. Early and late detection of weeds in herbaceous and woody crops to adapt herbicide treatments to emergencies (e.g. wheat-amapola-Papaver; wheat-Centaurea; corn-Xantium / Sorghum; vineyard-gram-Cynodon dactylon; olive grove-Conyza /Ecballium, among others).
2. 3D architecture of each vine (vineyard) or tree (olive grove, almond tree) to adjust foliar phytosanitary treatments to the canopy volume.
3. Phenotyping of varieties (olive, almond).

Our work is supported by:

1. High spatial resolution images from satellite and unmanned aerial vehicles.
2. Image analysis and processing using OBIA algorithms (pixel clustering), Machine Learning (e.g. pattern recognition) and Multivariate Analysis (Decision Trees or Random Forest: determining decisive variables in complex data classification).
3. Generation of maps of localized phytosanitary treatments.