Measuring NDVI in a Greenhouse Presents Challenges
Greenhouse growers need irrigation strategies to maintain high plant quality, but it’s difficult to obtain quantitative information on exactly how much water will produce the highest-quality growth.
Greenhouse plant canopies are highly variable.
Estimating irrigation needs by using reference evapotranspiration calculated from environmental factors and a crop coefficient is standard for controlling field crop irrigation, but in a greenhouse this method can be challenging. Greenhouse plant canopies are highly variable, and there’s limited information on the crop coefficient values for ornamental crops.
Researchers used a sensor-controlled automated irrigation system with soil moisture sensors.
Measuring Crop Size
University of Georgia researcher, Shuyang Zhen, wanted to find out if she could solve this problem for greenhouse growers using NDVI measurements to adjust for canopy size. In a greenhouse setting, she and her team planted four types of fast growing herbaceous plants in small containers on top of greenhouse benches. They set up a small weather station to monitor environmental parameters and used that data to calculate reference evapotranspiration.
NDVI measurements are a non-destructive, continuous monitoring method to get information as to how big a crop is.
Using a sensor-controlled automated irrigation system with soil moisture sensors, the team determined the amount of water the plants used, which allowed them to calculate a crop coefficient on a daily basis. They then used NDVI measurements to monitor crop size. Shuyang says, “It’s easy to monitor environmental factors such as light, temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed, but it’s much harder to determine how big the crop is because many methods are destructive and time-consuming. We chose NDVI measurements as a non-destructive, continuous monitoring method to get information as to how big our crop was. We were specifically interested in looking at how NDVI changes with the crop coefficient and how those two parameters correlate with each other.”
Some species were more upward growing and some more sprawling.
Shuyang mounted multiple NDVI sensors on top of the benches, approximately four feet from the plants. Each sensor had a field of view of about .6 square meters and tracked the changes in plant size and NDVI values for over 8 weeks. Shuyang says, “Each species had different growth habits. Some species were more upward growing and some more sprawling. They also had different leaf chlorophyll content. Over the course of my study, three species reached reproductive stages, producing flowers. All of these factors had an effect on the NDVI measurements.”
Next week: Learn the results of the experiment and how fast growth and flowering caused problems with the measurement.
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