The Application of Ground-based and Satellite Remote Sensing for Estimation of Bio-physiological Parameters of Wheat Grown Under Different Water Regimes

Remote sensing technologies have been widely studied for the estimation of crop biometricand physiological parameters. The number of sensors and data acquisition methods have beenincreasing, and their evaluation is becoming a necessity. The aim of this study was to assess theperformance of two remote sensing data for describing the variations of biometric and physiologicalparameters of durum wheat grown under dierent water regimes (rainfed, 50% and 100% ofirrigation requirements). The experimentation was carried out in Policoro (Southern Italy) fortwo growing seasons. The Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 images and radiometric ground-based datawere acquired regularly during the growing season with plant biometric (leaf area index and dryaboveground biomass) and physiological (stomatal conductance, net assimilation, and transpirationrate) parameters. Water deficit index was closely related to plant water status and crop physiologicalparameters. The enhanced vegetation index showed slightly better performance than the normalizeddierence vegetation index when plotted against the leaf area index with R2 = 0.73. The overall resultsindicated that the ground-based vegetation indices were in good agreement with the satellite-basedindices. The main constraint for eective application of satellite-based indices remains the presence ofclouds during the acquisition time, which is particularly relevant for winter-spring crops. Therefore,the integration of remote sensing and field data might be needed to optimize plant response underspecific growing conditions and to enhance agricultural production.