Airborne multi-spectral monitoring of agricultural crop status: effect of time of year, crop type and crop condition parameter

Airborne optical multispectral imagery was acquired in conjunction with contemporaneous ground-based measurements of various crops (leaf area index, canopy temperature, plant height) at a test site in southern Alberta, Canada. Data were acquired on three occasions in July 1994 for a variety of crops and irrigation practices. A large number of crop condition-spectral relations were examined to determine whether the imagery could be used to measure the various crop condition parameters. It was found that a number of statistically significant correlations exist between the imagery and the crop condition parameters and that these correlations vary as a function of crop type, time of year, and crop condition parameter. The results suggest that in many cases, multi-spectral optical imagery can be used to monitor variations in crop condition parameters across the growing season for a variety of crop types.