Equipment to characterize the vegetation

These include Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to record plant characteristics; such vehicles meanwhile represent an innovative alternative to classical remote sensing with manned aircraft or satellites due to their low cost and the short-term availability of sensor data with high spatial resolution.

Several spectral bands are necessary to compute the Red Edge Inflection Point (REIP), which is needed to determine the vegetation indices to derive biomass and nitrogen supply. The UAV available at the Institute of Crop Science is a commercial hexacopter, equipped with a REIP camera.