Agronomic and Economic Potential of Vegetation Indices for Rice N Recommendations under Organic and Mineral Fertilization in Mediterranean Regions

21 Pags.- 5 Figs.- 5 Tabls. © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) farmers in Mediterranean regions usually apply organic or mineral fertilizers before seeding that are supplemented with mineral nitrogen (N) later in the season. In general, the midseason N is applied without consideration of the actual crop N status, which may lead to over-fertilization and associated environmental problems. Thus, the purpose of this study was to design and evaluate a N recommendation approach using aerial images for Mediterranean paddy rice systems. A two-year rice field experiment was established in northeastern Spain, with different rates of pig slurry (PS) and mineral N fertilizer. Multispectral aerial images were taken at the rice booting stage, and several vegetation indices (VIs) were calculated. The VIs showed strong relationships with yield and the relations significantly differed between the PS and mineral fertilization treatments. The strongest relations with yield were obtained with gMCARINIR, proposed in this study, (R2 = 0.67), GNDVI (R2 = 0.64) and MCARINIR (R2 = 0.64), indicating the importance of including the green band information. The N recommendation approach generated using the VIs information showed a high success (87.5%) in the preliminary evaluation. The economic and environmental analysis showed that this approach provides a useful tool when compared to the usual farmer practices.
This study was funded by the National Institute for Agricultural and Food Scientific Research and Technology of Spain (INIA) and FEDER funds (RTA2010-0126-C02-01 and RTA2013-0057-C05-04). B. Moreno-García was granted with an FPI-INIA fellowship.