A compact VNIR (Visible-NIR) Hyperspectral Imaging System for Remote-Sensing equipped with lightweight LiDAR plus a high precision LiDAR with multiple returns coupled with a high-resolution RBG càmera

280.000€

245.000 €

CERCA GINYS-III 010

a) Compact and portable high precision VNIR hyperspectral camera (Headwall brand and Nano HP model) and its corresponding controller, accompanied by a compact and portable LiDAR device (Velodyne brand and VLP 16 Puck Lite model) and its corresponding controller fully compatible with the VNIR hyperspectral camera, for MDE extraction (Models Digital Elevations of Us in the Orthorectification Process of Hyperspectral Images). b) Equipped with high precision LiDAR with multiple (5) returns (Riegl brand and miniVUX-SYS model) and its corresponding controller suitable for advanced agricultural and forestry applications, along with a high resolution RGB camera compatible with high precision LiDAR (Sony brand and model 6000). c) A crew-controlled flying drone (UAV) (DJI brand and model Matrice 300 RTK) capable of supporting either 1) the hyperspectral camera set and compact LiDAR, or 2) the high-precision LiDAR equipment and the high-resolution RGB camera, including its corresponding integration kits.

Both centers share the mission of leveraging experience and resources to become Spanish and European benchmarks in translational forestry and agri-food research. The requested infrastructure will be essential to consolidate this mission, bringing cutting-edge remote sensing technology to many different areas of the agroforestry research portfolio, while promoting collaborations within the framework of the JRU CTFC-AGROTECNIO, but also beyond the groups and staff currently comprising it.

JRU members, and by extension, CTFC and AGROTECNIO members, work closely with forestry and agricultural administrations, local authorities, and private companies to provide knowledge and practical tools for their daily work. Furthermore, AGROTECNIO and CTFC coordinate and participate in a wide variety of outreach and communication activities through their communications departments. Communication activities with social impact include workshops, media articles, books, television, radio, and press releases, and youth activities, among others. The use and applications of the equipment will be disseminated through the media and social networks, based on an efficient communication plan aimed at the general public.

The equipment will be used in research and transfer projects and services linked to the main lines of work developed by the aforementioned JRU and can be integrated (along with the general ones of the CTFC and AGROTECNIO) into the resource assessment and action design processes of companies in the sector and the services of the competent administration. This equipment will also allow the teams to participate in research and innovation actions at the same level as European partners in European calls for proposals in the strategic sectors of agriculture and the monitoring of forest systems and their ecosystem services. The use of this technology applied to the forestry, environmental, and agricultural fields will have a disruptive effect, as it will allow the collection and processing of a huge amount of information from large areas with complex structures and many variables and ecosystem services to monitor, as is the case with forests.

The planned applications common to both centers are: 1) forest inventory, including the characterization of canopy structural parameters; 2) diagnostics (health, water, production) of large forest areas; 3) phenotyping of tree or herbaceous crops for genetic improvement; 4) crop and soil monitoring for precision agriculture. This involves the assessment, with unprecedented precision, of the water status and architecture of plant systems through the use of multiple vegetation indices not limited by the number of sensors on multispectral cameras. A significant added value of the system is the ability to jointly perform a physiological characterization of vegetation properties, based on hyperspectral information, and a geometric and structural characterization of the canopy, based on LiDAR. This offers enormous potential for characterizing forest dynamics and monitoring crop response to a wide variety of agricultural treatments and soil management techniques in precision agriculture.