ABSTRACT
Modern agricultural crop production relies on close monitoring of the crop status. This enables efœcient management of available resources for proœtable and environmentally friendly agricultural practice. Broadly used monitoring tools are mainly based on point sampling of biophysical and biochemical properties of the crop. Numerous crop properties have been studied over the years and act as indicators of the crop condition. Local and global growth protocols have been developed based on these measured biophysical and biochemical properties. For example, irrigation management of cotton is widely based on the height measurement of the plants in selected points, a biophysical property that can be easily measured by simple means, but it is labor intensive and based on selected sampled spots. Another example is fertilization management in potatoes, where nitrate content in the petiole is used as an indication for the fertilizer need. Table 13.1 presents a list of some important biophysical and biochemical properties that are used in growing protocols of agricultural crops.
