Aerial perspective will give farmers more accurate information about soil and crops
BY BETH KENT SPARK PROGRAM
When professional sports-event organizers need a bird's-eye view of the action, they often summon an airborne blimp. It's become practically synonymous with major outdoor sporting events, putting the crowd, the stadium and even the city in perspective.
This spring, blimps will find a new application: agriculture. In collaboration with Prof. Laura van Eerd of Ridgetown College, Prof. Richard Heck of the Department of Land Resource Science will use a blimp to study and monitor aspects of crop production that are best seen from an aerial perspective, such as plant stress across fields, which can be related to soil fertility and moisture dynamics.
They hope the blimp's-eye view will provide new perspectives on the ecological well-being of farmland.
“Data collection devices on the blimp can record detailed images of fields throughout the growing season,” says Heck. “That would help us gain a better understanding of how plant characteristics reflect soil conditions.”
The tethered, helium-filled 21- by seven-foot prototype will fly over southwestern Ontario field test plots at an altitude of 500 feet. The blimp is outfitted with two high-resolution digital cameras, manipulated by remote control.
One camera captures normal colour images, while the other collects near infrared light information, which is just outside the visual range of humans. Both cameras can capture images at 10- to 15-centimetre intervals across a given land base.
A thermal infrared imager is also mounted on the blimp, which allows for nighttime studies of heat emissions from the fields.
Heck says the blimp is a huge step towards improving land resource studies because traditional methods of collecting soil samples don't provide comprehensive coverage of the area. Satellites — positioned about 20,000 kilometres from Earth — can also provide complete coverage, but their resolution is lower and they can't guarantee an accurate picture, with ever-changing weather patterns, cloud cover and daylight consistency getting in the way. Aerial photography provides good resolution, he says, but it's more costly to operate, especially when multiple images are desired.
By contrast, small monitoring blimps, which have been tested in different parts of Canada, are inexpensive, easier to operate and close enough to the ground to get a complete and detailed picture of the fields below. And they don't take a lot of time to set up. Researchers can leave the blimp aloft for several hours at a time as it collects images throughout the day.
Heck believes more accurate information about soil and crops will help farmers develop more efficient management practices specific to their fields and even help improve environmentally friendly practices.
This research was sponsored by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust.
