Monitoring digestate application on agricultural crops using Sentinel-2 Satellite imagery
This addresses the need for scalable and cost-effective monitoring of exogenous organic matter in agriculture to support precision agriculture and sustainability, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new context.
This study tackled the problem of monitoring digestate application on agricultural crops by using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and machine learning models, achieving F1-scores up to 0.85 for detection.
The widespread use of Exogenous Organic Matter in agriculture necessitates monitoring to assess its effects on soil and crop health. This study evaluates optical Sentinel-2 satellite imagery for detecting digestate application, a practice that enhances soil fertility but poses environmental risks like microplastic contamination and nitrogen losses. In the first instance, Sentinel-2 satellite image time series (SITS) analysis of specific indices (EOMI, NDVI, EVI) was used to characterize EOM's spectral behavior after application on the soils of four different crop types in Thessaly, Greece. Furthermore, Machine Learning (ML) models (namely Random Forest, k-NN, Gradient Boosting and a Feed-Forward Neural Network), were used to investigate digestate presence detection, achieving F1-scores up to 0.85. The findings highlight the potential of combining remote sensing and ML for scalable and cost-effective monitoring of EOM applications, supporting precision agriculture and sustainability.