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Unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to study the effects of tillage systems on crop growth and yield

Juan Landivar-Bowles

Global warming present serious challenges to world food
supply. Increased levels of carbon dioxide and temperature
in the atmosphere may help some plants to be more productive.
However, the effects of increase air temperature causing
floods and drought may reduce crop yields. Agriculture scientists
are responding to these challenges by developing resilient
cultivars with drought, heat and salt tolerance and cropping
systems with improve water use efficiency. Our research team
at Texas A&M AgriLife and Texas A&M University-Corpus
Christi has develop an UAS-platform to help plant breeder and
agronomist identifying elite germplasm and best crop management
practices. This study presents a novel approach to use
multi-temporal UAS data for comparison of two management
practices in cotton, conventional tillage (CT) and no-tillage or
conservation tillage (NT). The plant parameters considered for
the comparison are: canopy height (CH), canopy cover (CC),
canopy volume (CV) and Normalized Difference Vegetation
Index (NDVI). Initially, the whole study area was divided into
approximately one square meter size grids. Measurements were
extracted grid wise using high resolution UAS data captured
ten times over whole crop growing season of the cotton. One
tailed Z-test hypothesis reveals that there is a significant difference
between cotton growth under CT and NT for almost
all the epochs. With 95% confidence interval, the crop grown
under NT found to have taller canopy, higher canopy cover,
bigger biomass and higher NDVI, as compared to those under
CT cropping system.