Drone Monitoring in Agriculture: major advantages for resource optimization

In vineyard surveying operations, drones have proven to be an essential tool for the morphological and vegetative analysis of crops.

Having precise and immediate information on plant health is crucial for planning targeted and effective interventions aimed at optimizing the distribution of water and plant protection products, thereby reducing costs, safeguarding crops, and increasing productivity.

In situations such as critical weather events, drone-based analysis may also represent the most immediate and effective solution for obtaining an accurate overview and assessing the most appropriate actions to implement.

In the case presented, multispectral data acquired using the MicaSense Altum-PT sensor mounted on the MAVtech RX3 UAV platform were processed to monitor a traditionally trained trellised vineyard.

High-resolution multispectral and thermal images, subsequently processed through a Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetric workflow, enabled the generation of a georeferenced orthomosaic, a digital elevation model (DEM), a dense point cloud, and a 3D vineyard model—essential tools for morphological and vegetative analysis of the crop.

Specific vegetation analysis algorithms were then applied to calculate the Leaf Area Index (LAI) and the MCARI/OSAVI indices, useful for assessing the physiological state of vegetation, vegetative vigor, and chlorophyll response.

By comparing the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and the NDRE (Normalized Difference Red Edge Index), differences in sensitivity in estimating vineyard vegetative status were highlighted. In particular, NDRE is more effective in analyzing crops with high leaf density, proving more sensitive to variations in chlorophyll content during the later stages of the vegetative cycle compared to the traditional NDVI.