Abstract
Biomass and yield are important
variables used for assessing agricultural production and performance.
However, these variables are difficult to predict for individual plants
at the farm scale, and prediction models and accuracies may be affected
by abiotic stresses such as salinity. In this study, a diversity panel
of the wild tomato species, Solanum pimpinellifolium, was evaluated
through field- and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based assessment of 600
control and 600 salt-treated plants. The aim of this research was to
determine if red-green-blue (RGB) UAV-based imagery, collected one, two,
four, six, seven and eight weeks before harvest could predict fresh
shoot mass, tomato fruit numbers, and yield mass at harvest, and if
prediction accuracies varied between control and salt-treated plants.
Multi-spectral UAV-based imagery was also collected one and two weeks
prior to harvest for comparison with the RGB imagery. A random forest
machine learning approach was used to model biomass and yield. The
results showed that shape features such as plant area, border length,
width and length had the highest importance in the random forest models,
followed by vegetation indices and the entropy texture measure. The
highest explained variances of 87.95%, 63.88% and 66.51% were achieved
using multi-spectral UAV imagery two weeks prior to harvest for fresh
shoot mass, fruit numbers and yield mass per plant, respectively. The
RGB UAV imagery produced very similar results to those of the
multi-spectral UAV imagery, with the explained variance reducing as a
function of increasing time to harvest. Higher accuracies were achieved
with separate models for predicting yield of salt-stressed plants,
whereas the prediction of yield for control plants was less affected if
the model included salt-stressed plants. This research demonstrates that
it is feasible to predict the average biomass and yield up to eight
weeks prior to harvest within 4.23% of field-based measurements, and at
the individual plant level up to four weeks prior to harvest. Results
from this work may be useful in providing guidance for yield forecasting
of healthy and salt-stressed tomato plants, which in turn may inform
growing practices, logistical planning and sales operations.
Keywords
biomass
UAV
Random forest