Dr. Leisa Armstrong (Senior Lecturers)

School of Science, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia

Topic: Improving agricultural productivity with UAV/Drone and sensor data.

Recent technological advances in field sensors and wide area and mobile networks and the use of drones has provided the possibility for farmers to integrate these systems for the detection and monitoring of climate and crop growth. These technologies can be used to improve decisions related to crop agronomy, fertiliser, disease, and climate.

This presentation will explore the status of using drone, UAV and various field sensing devices for farming. It will cover some of the technical and other concerns with using and integrating data captured from these systems and its capacity to be integrated with other data to allow farmers and other stakeholders to make better decisions. The practical challenge is collating data from various formats into traits that have value to agricultural producers. This presentation also provides some lessons learnt from this process and provides suggestions on some of the issues of using drones and other sensors to improve crop productivity in different agricultural production systems.