Sort:
Issue
High Spatiotemporal Resolution Remote Sensing for Precision Agricultural Disaster Early Warning: Progress, Bottlenecks, and Integrative Pathways
Smart Agriculture 2026, 8(2): 18-34
Published: 01 March 2026
Abstract PDF (29.3 MB) Collect
Downloads:20
Significance

Under climate change, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have increased markedly, posing persistent threats to global food security. Agricultural meteorological disasters, including droughts, floods, heat stress, frost damage, and mechanically induced events such as lodging and hail, are increasingly characterized by rapid onset, strong spatial heterogeneity, and compound interactions. Conventional management strategies relying mainly on post-event assessment are insufficient for timely warning and precision intervention. The development of high spatiotemporal resolution remote sensing and integrated observation systems combining satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and ground-based sensing has substantially advanced agricultural disaster monitoring. These technologies enable field-scale characterization of spatial variability and detection of short-duration disaster processes at hourly to daily timescales. This review synthesizes recent progress in sky-air-ground integrated remote sensing for agricultural meteorological disaster management and establishes a unified framework linking monitoring, early warning, and decision-making, with emphasis on hydrological stress, thermal stress, and structural damage.

Progress

At the observation level, a multi-tier sensing architecture has emerged. Satellite remote sensing provides broad coverage and regular revisit cycles, forming the backbone of regional monitoring. Optical sensors support retrieval of crop structural and biochemical parameters, thermal infrared data enable canopy temperature and evapotranspiration estimation, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers all-weather capability for soil moisture and flood detection. Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) provides direct information on crop photosynthetic function and enables early identification of physiological stress. UAV platforms complement satellites through flexible deployment and centimeter-scale resolution, allowing detailed mapping of canopy temperature and three-dimensional crop structure using multispectral, thermal, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors. Ground-based meteorological stations and sensor networks provide continuous measurements for calibration and validation, although scaling point observations to spatially continuous products remains challenging. Consequently, multi-sensor integration is evolving from data stacking toward physically complementary constraint frameworks. Methodologically, two dominant approaches of physically based inversion and data-driven recognition are used. Radiative transfer models, surface energy balance methods, and SAR scattering models offer strong physical interpretability but depend on prior information and data quality. Machine learning and deep learning methods effectively capture nonlinear relationships and complex spatial patterns for disaster identification, yet remain limited by interpretability and cross-regional generalization. At the early-warning stage, crop growth models, hydrological models, and spatiotemporal prediction networks are applied to simulate disaster evolution. Hybrid models embedding physical constraints into data-driven frameworks have become a key research direction to enhance predictive robustness. Decision-support systems have expanded from threshold-based rule engines toward optimization algorithms and multi-objective frameworks, enabling warning information to be translated into actionable irrigation scheduling, protective measures, and emergency responses. Regarding specific hazards, drought monitoring has shifted from vegetation indices toward coupling root-zone soil moisture with crop physiological responses, with SIF-based indicators showing strong potential for early stress detection. Flood studies rely primarily on SAR-based inundation mapping and extend toward quantitative damage assessment. Heat and frost stress research emphasizes growth-stage-dependent dynamic thresholds. Lodging monitoring integrates structural parameters derived from optical, LiDAR, and SAR data, while hail-related studies focus on rapid post-event damage mapping. Compound and cascading disasters have become an important research frontier.

Conclusions and Prospects

High spatiotemporal resolution remote sensing has greatly enhanced the observability and early-warning potential of agricultural meteorological disasters. Nevertheless, key challenges remain, including heterogeneous data integration, scale inconsistency, uncertainty propagation, and insufficient coupling among monitoring, warning, and decision-making components. Future progress requires a systems-engineering perspective. Physically guided machine learning can bridge mechanistic understanding and data adaptability, while agricultural disaster digital twins provide a framework for dynamic interaction among observation, simulation, and decision optimization. In parallel, multi-factor time-series risk modeling and multi-agent learning are needed to better represent compound disaster processes and support intelligent, adaptive, and precision-oriented agricultural disaster management systems.

Open Access Issue
Comparison of three models for winter wheat yield prediction based on UAV hyperspectral images
International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering 2024, 17(2): 260-267
Published: 30 April 2024
Abstract PDF (2 MB) Collect
Downloads:51

Predicting crop yield timely can considerably accelerate agricultural production management and food policy-making, which are also important requirements for precise agricultural development. Given the development of hyperspectral imaging technology, a simple and efficient modeling method is convenient for predicting crop yield by using airborne hyperspectral images. In this study, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) hyperspectral and maturity yield data in 2014-2015 and 2017-2018 were collected. The winter wheat yield prediction model was established by optimizing Vegetation Indices (VIs) feature scales and sample scales, incorporating Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR), Random Forest algorithm (RF), and Back Propagation Neural Network algorithm (BPN). Results showed that PLSR stands out as the optimal wheat yield prediction model considering stability and accuracy (RMSE=948.88 kg/hm2). Contrary to the belief that more input features result in higher accuracy, PLSR, RF, and BPN models performed best when trained with the top 3, 8, and 4 VIs with the highest correlation, respectively. With an increase in training samples, model accuracy improves, reaching stability when the training samples reach 70. Using PLSR and optimal feature scales, UAV yield prediction maps were generated, holding significant value for field management in precision agriculture.

Open Access Review Article Issue
Remote sensing of quality traits in cereal and arable production systems: A review
The Crop Journal 2024, 12(1): 45-57
Published: 11 November 2023
Abstract PDF (2.3 MB) Collect
Downloads:11

Cereal is an essential source of calories and protein for the global population. Accurately predicting cereal quality before harvest is highly desirable in order to optimise management for farmers, grading harvest and categorised storage for enterprises, future trading prices, and policy planning. The use of remote sensing data with extensive spatial coverage demonstrates some potential in predicting crop quality traits. Many studies have also proposed models and methods for predicting such traits based on multi-platform remote sensing data. In this paper, the key quality traits that are of interest to producers and consumers are introduced. The literature related to grain quality prediction was analyzed in detail, and a review was conducted on remote sensing platforms, commonly used methods, potential gaps, and future trends in crop quality prediction. This review recommends new research directions that go beyond the traditional methods and discusses grain quality retrieval and the associated challenges from the perspective of remote sensing data.

Open Access Research Article Issue
Should phenological information be applied to predict agronomic traits across growth stages of winter wheat?
The Crop Journal 2022, 10(5): 1346-1352
Published: 27 August 2022
Abstract PDF (1.7 MB) Collect
Downloads:8

Most existing agronomic trait models of winter wheat vary across growing seasons, and it is an open question whether a unified statistical model can be developed to predict agronomic traits using a vegetation index (VI) across multiple growing seasons. In this study, we constructed a hierarchical linear model (HLM) to automatically adapt the relationship between VIs and agronomic traits across growing seasons and tested the model’s performance by sensitivity analysis. Results demonstrated that (1) optical VIs give poor performance in predicting AGB and PNC across all growth stages, whereas VIs perform well for LAI, LGB, LNC, and SPAD. (2) The sensitivity indices of the phenological information in the AGB and PNC prediction models were 0.81–0.86 and 0.66–0.73, whereas LAI, LGB, LNC, and SPAD prediction models produced sensitivity indexes of 0.01–0.02, 0.01–0.02, 0.01–0.02, and 0.02–0.08, respectively. (3) The AGB and PNC prediction models considering ZS were more accurate than the prediction models based on VI. Whether or not phenological information is used, there was no difference in model accuracy for LGB, LNC, SPAD, and LAI. This study may provide a guideline for deciding whether phenological correction is required for estimation of agronomic traits across multiple growing seasons.

Total 4