The Utilization of Remotely Sensed Data for Plantation

During the recent decade, the use of data taken from remote sensing has been widely developed for many aspects in plantation. Begin with the application for mapped the field and plantation until the use of multi/hyperspectral censors for further application. The development of remote sensing application in plantation, generally agriculture, encourage the multi-disciplinary related science which later known as Precision Agriculture.

In precision agriculture, intervention of ge0-related science such as Geography, Geodesy, GIS and Agricultural science like Agronomy, Crop Protection, Plant Breeding are clearly visible in actual application. From various articles and journals related to precision agriculture that I have read, mostly the themes of them are related to the utilization of data from remote sensing. Due to its practicability and easiness of temporal acquisition, remote sensing data also show the accurate and precise result for identify and give the solution for agricultural problems.

Oil palm plantation play major role important in economic aspect in Indonesia. As the second largest (cmiiw) exporter of crude palm oil in the world, it is not surprising if there are a lot of plantation which owned by government or private. There are also many seed producer which have best quality such as SumBio, PPKS, etc.  The most important also, many of the plantation company in Indonesia which have utilized GIS as a decision support tools, mostly used for mapping their estate and for research purpose.

Using satellite imagery is one of various methods to get the spatial data, for example for mapping the estate. We can easily digitize the feature like main road, block road, field boundary, river, and many more. Estate mapping is essential for getting the basic data from remote sensing data. Besides, ground checking is also needed for taking the data which we could not get from satellite imagery such as if the area covered with cloud or its shadow. So, the combination source of data taken both from remote sensing and ground checking will improve the accurate and precise measurement.

Recent mapping related to oil palm plantation has a significantly shifting from only estate mapping to more detail mapping. As oil palm trees are valuable asset of the company, it is necessary for monitoring them individually. It has been done in oil palm company to monitor individual palm especially for research purposes which are related to pathology or daily census trees. Therefore, the same of how the data should be taken which previously described in the paragraph before, is absolutely can be applied. But because each of individual palm tree has absolute location, which represent in center point of its tree, it is better to use differential GPS receiver if the data taken from ground checking. Why this should be done? It is precision matter. Data with no differential post-processing have less accuration than using post-processing calculation.

Palm points classification from satellite imagery

Further development by multispectral bands or hyperspectral bands made the application of remote sensing in agriculture valuable. Recent research shows that there are corelation between near-infrared bands in multispectral with the leaf nutrients like nitrogen, magnesium, phosphorus, and sulfur so that with remote sensing data we can detecting and make prediction for nutrients management such as fertilizer recommendation and nutrients deficiency management. It also can be applied in pathology since Ganoderma became the major problems in every oil palm plantation in Indonesia. The oil palm trees which suffered from Ganoderma show stress on their leaves so we can detect the spread of oil palm trees  by using the vegetation index such as NDVI, GBNDVI, SR, etc.

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