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SEARCHING FOR DISEASE-RESISTANT SUGAR BEET VARIETIES USING MAPEO

Seed breeders are always in search for new, disease-resistant cultivars to help farmers grow productive and healthy crops in a sustainable way. To support this, BELSPO initiated the BEETPHEN project in which SESVanderHave, VITO Remote Sensing and CRA-w evaluated the use of hyperspectral drone imagery and innovative remote sensing technology for crop phenotyping in sugar beet breeding trials. Discover how they used MAPEO to create a digital twin of the trial fields.

TOWARDS A MORE EFFICIENT PHENOTYPING WITH MAPEO

Multi-national sugar beet seed company SESVanderHave is breaking into remote sensing to improve their selection programmes. By monitoring its trial fields for crop breeding with drones and analysing the data via MAPEO, they are able to upscale their ‘phenotyping’ process. Maarten Vanderstukken and Jurgen Decloedt explain how drone-based phenotyping supports seed breeders and crop protection firms to speed up their cultivation and selection programmes.

DRONE BASED FLOWER COUNT IN FRUIT ORCHARDS

Every fruit grower wants to obtain a rich and profitable harvest at the end of the season. Reducing the number of flowers and fruitlets early in the growing season is therefore often needed to limit the nutritional competition among fruits. Expert Stephanie Delalieux explains how VITO Remote Sensing and KU Leuven are using MAPEO to develop an automated process for detailed monitoring of flowering intensity over fruit orchards.

BOOSTING DRONE-BASED SERVICES IN AGRICULTURE

Despite their large potential, drone-based services are not yet sufficiently implemented in day-to-day operations by farmers and agrifood companies in Flanders.
Within the OpsDrone project, VITO, ILVO and FlandersMake share their expertise on drones and agriculture with the sector, to speed up the investments in the drone technology. By diversifying the agrofood use-cases we ensure that technological solutions and business plans are tailored to a specific case. 

STREAMLINE YOUR DRONE OPERATIONS

Managing drone missions & analyzing the data has to be easy & flexible. Companies, governments & researchers require specific data products to serve as valuable and reliable input for their downstream operations and services. 
That's why our experts continuously keep improving our end-to-end MAPEO platform to streamline data acquisition campaigns, image processing and online hosting of raw data and derived information products.
New features, including 'instant pricing', 'communication platform' and 'improved API' support users with their day-to-day drone management.

DO'S AND DON'TS

Collecting drone data has evolved tremendously over the past years. We have a wide spectrum of end-to-end drone platforms, a variety of sensors and high-quality image processing tools. But there is one thing we cannot pass by: the ground control points or GCPs. GCPs guarantee the accuracy and consistency in your data products, but they obviously also complicate the drone operations quite a bit. In this blog we share the do's and don'ts related to GCPs, new features of MAPEO to make sure your data is accurate and consistent and 5 expert tips to have a successful drone data collection campaign.

INTEGRATING & TESTING THE PHASE ONE IXM-100 MP

One of the big future trends in drone mapping for agricultural applications is the combination of high-resolution (<=1mm) imagery with powerful AI algorithms to detect specific plants or plant features like fruits, flowers or diseases.
In a recent blog, expert Dries Raymaekers explains more about the use and integration of a high resolution camera, the Phase One IXM 100 MP,  its advantages and disadvantages, and three operational agricultural applications which rely on (sub)mm resolution and AI detection algorithms: disease detection in sugar beet, wheat ear detection and emergence count in lettuce.

PROTECTING AGRICULTURE AGAINST DROUGHT

It is expected that summers in Flanders will experience more and more periods of heat and drought in the coming years.
SESVanderHave has been working with VITO's remote sensing expert since 2016. With the Sense of Field project, they are looking at how the different sugar beet varieties respond to certain environmental conditions. 
The study aims to protect agriculture from hot, dry summers and increase the drought tolerance of cultivated crops.

You can have a closer look at this Sense of Field project, the VITO-SESVanderHave partnership and technologies that help build a more sustainable future.