Geomatic Techniques Applied for Remote Determination of the Hay Quantity in Agrosilvopastoral Systems

Abstract

The paper presents a descriptive model, applicable in agricultural theory and practice, for determining the quantity of alfalfa hay obtained from a land surface, using remote investigations, by geospatial methods and means. The working algorithm was tested in a rural area located in the northern part of Romania, in the Humor Depression, and the data acquisition was made with DJI Phantom 4 Pro - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle equipment. For the automated calculation of the amount of alfalfa hay harvested from a certain surface and stored as haystacks, the following steps were carried out: processing the images acquired with the drone to obtain the point clouds, determining the 3D model of the haystacks, calculating the volume of hay stored in the stacks and converting the volume in quantity of hay/surface. As a result of the measurements and calculations carried out, a quantity of hay of 11.96 tons/ha was obtained, data verified and validated by the researches from the specialized literature. Compared with the agronomic methods, the use of the geomatics techniques, to determine the quantity of hay harvested from an agricultural area, presents a series of practical and economic advantages: they exclude the manual measurements in the field and, therefore, the displacements on extended surfaces; reduce the working time; have high precision because, for the estimation of the haystacks volume, three-dimensional models are used, instead of the traditional mathematical formulas. At the same time, geospatial data is acquired through drone flying, which can be used in other types of analysis. The working algorithm can also be applied to other studied objectives or research topics.

Assessment of the Impact of Population Reduction on Grasslands with a New “Tool”: A Case Study on the “Mountainous Banat” Area of Romania

“…According to the data from the literature, there are different methods and indicators of quantitative and qualitative assessment of the grasslands, specifically of their biodiversity and conservation state [90,91], grassland degradation [92,93], keeping in mind the classification of the grasslands [94], and intensity of land use [95], achieved by the application of some indexes and methods of remote sensing, GIS and photogrammetry [96][97][98][99], etc. In this research, the Grassland Anthropic Impact Index (GAII) was applied, which is an index that shows the potential use of the grasslands by the inhabitants of the area.…”

Techniques for identification, mapping and analysis of grasslands. Case study: Arad county

“…), assessments, predictions or sustainable development (Wang et al, 2003 Starting from the idea of conserving biodiversity and especially grasslands with High Natural Value, a series of studies describe the methods and classification systems used for the global biogeographical characterization of grassland types (Dixon et al, 2014;Cojocariu et al, 2019). The development of applications and working methodology with satellite images offers multiple possibilities for their use also in terms of: analysis of the composition of grassland vegetation (Schmidtlein and Sassin, 2004;Harshit and Jeganathan, 2019), mapping (Simon et al, 2020), monitoring and management of grasslands (Goldewijk et al, 2007;Jadha et al, 2007;Schuster et al, 2015;Iftikhar et al, 2016;Copăcean et al, 2020), the study of biophysical parameters at the biome level, the analysis of productivity (Gu et al, 2013) or change analysis (Shalaby and Tateishi, 2007).…”