ИСТИНА

Agrocenose assessment in the field for the yield prediction must be accessible, acceptable, and adequate. It should allow for increasing the agrochemicals effectiveness, for the creation of better plant growth conditions. Also it allows to use of availabe techniques for all kinds of agrotechnology. There are two blocks of challenges requiring innovative developments. The first challenge is the choice of ways for obtaining information about crop status and about materials used for underlying surface remote sensing. We could use space images with different resolution, spectral ranges and shooting time. It is necessary to get the prognosis information at the proper time. All the data should be timed to the required period of crop vegetation or a fixed calendar time. The challenge of the dynamic weather influence and climate changing, the passage of atmospheric fronts and the cloud cover in the area are not addressed by the end yet . It limits the possibility to use of images from space. It is impossible to make recommendations and optimize mineral nutrition a by mineral fertilization (root and foliar top feeding). The duration of the growing season is 80-120 days on average. It is possible to compensate for the revealed deficiency of nutrients only in the first phases of development and growth which does not exceed half of this time for the majority of cultivated crops. The use of digital cameras or ground-based scanners is possible almost at any time. But the size of the surveyed area is related to the duration of the work and we need to move vehicles and the instrument base for crops and plantations during the growing season. The difficult terrain (mountainous terrain, farming on terraces, etc.) also introduces its difficulties. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is optimal. They avoid many technical and temporary challenges. They must have the required characteristics such as payload, non-stop operation period, stable operation of the equipment, safety in emergency situations, availability of systems and means of real-time information transmission, duplication and accumulation, determination of the course and coordinates of the aircraft at the time of shooting, increase speed without compromising the usefulness of the final data. The principal point is the possibility of simultaneously obtaining as much as possible data of the underlying surface and agrocenosis from a complex of cameras and other sensors installed on the UAV. The technology named «Aeragro» was created by the Wicron company with the participation of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. It is used for the field fertility passport, for accompanying the conduct of agronomic experiments and field experiments, as well as for landscape design and land management. It includes the processing of two-dimensional cartographic and orthomosaic data. The characteristics (indicators) of negative (erosive) processes are calculated. The original software determines the dismemberment of the land plot by a ravine erosion network (REN), the level of exposure to soil cover of wind and water erosion; growth density, overgrown with weeds (% of the territory). Using the technology "swarm robots" provides a one-time comprehensive receipt of all necessary information. Experiments have shown the simultaneous use of five UAVs reduces the time required for this by three times. UAV technology «Aeragro» equipped for determining the spectral characteristics and calculation of the indices Blue NDVI (BNDVI), Enhanced NDVI (ENDVI) and the first universal integrated SMP-NDVI-77. It is performed in one span with reference to coordinates. The resolving power is about 3 cm per 1 pixel, and the average accuracy of the relief construction ranges from 2 to 15 cm. The original NDVI-77 multispectral lens (NIR / G / B) is installed on the UAV. The technology «Aeragro» allows quickly and timely to assess agrocenoses the condition in the field for the purposes of yield prediction, solving a wide range of applied agroecology and rational nature management problems. Project Aeragro was implemented with the financial support of the National Technology Initiative (NTI) for the development of AeroNet market. More information is available at http://aeragro.ru.