Dragon 4-Satellite Based Analysis of Diseases on Permanent and Row Crops in Italy and China

The AMEOS (Assimilating Multi-source Earth Observation Satellite data for crop pests and diseases monitoring and forecasting) project aims to bring together cutting edge research to provide pest and disease monitoring and forecast information, integrating multi-source information (Earth Observation, meteorological, entomological and plant pathological, etc.) to support decision making in the sustainable management of insect pests and diseases in agriculture. The main objective of the project, that is, improving crop diseases and pests monitoring and forecasting, will be achieved by utilizing EO data, developing new algorithms, and combining new and existing data from multi-source EO sensors to produce high spatial and temporal land surface information. The project foresees the assessment of the possibility of using available satellite images datasets to assess the evolution of diseases on permanent (olive groves, vineyards), or row crops (wheat) in Italy and China. The paper describes the results of the research activity which focused on: i) improving the classification of the agricultural areas devoted to winter wheat and olive trees, starting from what has been made available from the Corine Land Cover initiative; ii) developing an approach suitable to be automated for estimating trees by using Sentinel 2 images; iii) developing a new index, REDSI (consisting of Red, Re1, and Re3 bands), for detecting and monitoring yellow rust infection of winter wheat at the canopy and regional scale. The research activity covers the: 1) Province of Lecce, that is the Italian area strongly affected, since 2015, by the Xylella fastidiosa disease which causes a rapid decline in olive plantations. 2) Province of Anyang, Neihuang county, which was affected by the yellow rust disease in the spring 2017.