Recent progress in remote sensing for advancing sustainable and precision agriculture

Scalably sensing/estimating local information of environment, management, and crop at the field level is the first step of a “System-of-Systems” solution to quantify field-level agroecosystem dynamics (Guan et al., Earth-Science Reviews, 2023). This sensing effort involves two major and inherently connected tasks: (1) ground truth collection, and (2) cross-scale sensing. Agricultural ground truth is scarce and expensive to collect, however, the need for ground truth data is non-negotiable and should be a major investment with public funding. We have developed “cross-scale sensing” approaches to scale-up “ground truth” collection to large scales. In this talk, we will review our recent progress in using "cross-scale sensing" to accurately estimate critical variables of agroecosystem dynamics, covering management practices (e.g. tillage practice, crop rotation, cover crop adoption, irrigation), environmental conditions (e.g. soil properties), and crop traits and conditions (e.g. LAI, Vmax, phtosynthesis, crop yield). We will also identify current challenges and future opportunities to further advance remote sensing for sustainable and precision agriculture.