Application of Remote Sensing for Mapping Organic Cereal Crops

Today checks on organically managed fields are done by taking soil samples and carrying out laboratory analyzes to verify the presence of chemical fertilizers or other prohibited substances. A monitoring system based on the proposed procedure could allow targeted investigations to be carried out where the algorithm reports an anomaly or a doubtful situation, instead of carrying out blanket verification samples or randomly chosen sample fields. This would lead to significant savings for producers on the costs relating to laboratory analyzes of soil samples and further quality certification of the product. The study area was the Basilicata region in southern Italy. It is a predominantly cereal-growing region that is beginning to open up to sustainable management and the use of precision machinery and monitoring systems. The objective of the present work is the evaluation of the possibility of identify biological cereal crops by using multitemporal analysis of vegetation indices from Sentinel 2 satellite images. The developed algorithm has proven to be based on valid principles. It was validated by using 40 organic cereals crops fields reaching a satisfactory overall accuracy.