High resolution agriculture land cover using aerial digital photography and GIS : a case study for small island states

Abstract

With the advent of site-specific crop management, sustainability and profitability, land farming now requires information and technology-based management system to identify, analyse and manage spatial and temporal resource variability. Th is approach is being made increasingly possible by recent innovation in information technologies such as mobile devices, geographic information systems, positioning technologies (such as Geographical Position system), and Earth Observations. Such innovation now off ers a holistic approach to micro-manage agricultural resources. (Robert et al., 1994). Basic mapping and farm-level record keeping is one of the first precision agriculture practices that must be implemented in a typical productive agriculture operation (Stombaugh et al., 2001). Typical tasks include mapping of variations that occur in largescale field features such as vegetation stress, crop rotation, inventorying, irrigation, soil drainage and erosion, pest control, etc. Th e search for a low cost methodology that takes into account the growth of information technology in data capture and surveying, data processing, database creation and geographic information systems becomes mandatory in order to respond to such needs. Th e study constitutes, for the first time in Malta, the collection of high precision farming statistics that makes use of an inexpensive system for aerial mapping that requires minimal ground truthing. Th e effectiveness of such a method for small areas was later demonstrated by Galdies and Borg (2006) related to coastal and beach management in the Maltese islands. In the current case, digital aerial remote sensing enabled the accurate mapping of agricultural variables, and coupled with ground survey data, resulted in the production of precise, high resolution agricultural crop-cover maps. Additional information can be further derived from this data that can be used for the optimisation of micro agriculture practices.