Biomass Estimation of Vegetables—Can Remote Sensing Be a Tool for It?

Precision agriculture for vegetable crops has received little interest so far, although remote sensing (RS) has been used as an effective tool to monitor other agricultural production systems. The aim of this study therefore was to assess the applicability of RS imagery for capturing crop height information of three vegetable crops (eggplant, tomato, cabbage) during a complete growth cycle to infer biomass. Additionally, the effect of crop development stage on the relationship between estimated crop height and field measured crop height was examined. The study was conducted in an experimental layout at the University of Agricultural Sciences Bangalore in Bengaluru, India. Crop height and the biomass were measured at five dates during the crop growth cycle between February and May 2017. The prediction accuracy varied strongly depending on the applied statistical approach. For all crops, a good predictive performance with a cross-validated prediction error