Water Deficit Index (WDI) Mapping of Wheat Crop for Water Stress
Detection Using UAV-based Remote Sensing
Abstract
Water stress mapping in crops and its spatial disparity study at field
scale is important for precise management of irrigation. Results
obtained from conventional airborne practice (balloons, airplanes, and
satellites) are less acceptable for timely irrigation management due to
lack in spatial and temporal resolutions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
equipped with multispectral (MS) and thermal cameras with higher
spectral and temporal resolutions can be used as a promising tool for
preparing water stress maps under different water deficit conditions. In
this study, Water Deficit Index (WDI) maps are generated at different
days after sowing (DAS) in wheat crops under three different water
conditions (WI (well water), WS1(irrigation at 5 days’ interval), and
WS2 (irrigation at 11 days’ interval)) using the concept of Vegetation
Index Trapezoid (VIT) using UAV based thermal and MS imageries. The UAV
is flown at 60m altitude during the Rabi season 2018-19. After
pre-processing of images in Pix4dMapper, nine vegetation indices are
calculated from MS images and one of the indices, Normalized Green Red
Difference Index (NGRDI) is selected based on the higher correlation
with ground truth data (R2 greater than 0.5) and
visual interpretation according to the real field condition to construct
the VIT. Vegetation index and temperature values are calculated for four
points of VIT by using four boundary conditions such as bare soil with
(1) dry and (2) wet conditions, and full vegetation with (3)
well-watered and (4) water stress conditions. By using the ArcGIS,
geo-referencing of thermal images with respect to MS images is done to
get the exact overlap of both images, and resampling of thermal and MS
images are also carried out to get the same pixel size. WDI values are
estimated using VIT of the surface-air temperature difference and NGRDI,
and WDI maps are generated from the UAV-based thermal and MS imageries
for potential detection of crop water stress. The conventional Crop
Water Stress Index (CWSI) which is solely based on the crop canopy
temperature is outperformed by the WDI, which is integration of
composite land surface temperature (LST) and degree of greenness, and
could be effective enough for irrigation water management. Keywords:
UAV, Multispectral and Thermal imageries, NGRDI, WDI, and Wheat crop.