ABSTRACT
Remote sensing techniques are widely used in agriculture and agronomy. Nowadays, use of remote sensing is necessary as the monitoring of agricultural activities faces special problems not common to other economic sectors. First, agricultural production follows strong seasonal patterns related to the biological lifecycle of crops. Second, the production depends on the physical landscape (e.g., soil type) as well as climatic driving variables and agricultural management practices. All variables are highly unpredictable with respect to space and time. Moreover, as productivity can change within short-time periods, due to unfavorable growing conditions, the agricultural monitoring systems should be well-timed. This is even more important, as many items are perishable. The solution for providing food security to all people of the world without affecting the agro-ecological balance lies in the adoption of new research tools, particularly from aerospace remote sensing, and combining them with conventional as well as frontier technologies like Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Sustainable agricultural development is one of the prime objectives in all countries in the world, whether developed or developing. The broad objective of sustainable agriculture is to balance the inherent land resource with crop requirements, paying special attention to optimization of resource use toward the achievement of sustained productivity over a long period (Lal and Pierce, 1991). Sustainable agricultural development/sustainable increase in the crop production could be achieved by adopting a variety of agricultural technologies, which are summed up as follows:
Improved crop management technology through the use of high yielding, input responsive and soil, climatic, and biotic stresses – tolerant crop varieties;
Suitable cropping systems for different agro-ecological regions based on soil, terrain, and climatic suitability;
Integrated nutrient management for improving soil productivity and minimization of the risk of pollution of soil, water, and environment;
Integrated pest management for effective pests control as well as to reduce the adverse effects of pesticides on environment;
Soil and water conservation for controlling the soil degradation and improving the moisture availability.
Input use efficiency maximization in terms of the economic return with minimal input.
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