Geosciences and Remote Sensing

Agricultural crop inventories provide important baseline information that can be used by stakeholders to assess the sustainability of the agricultural sector. Changing climatic conditions and the changing economics of the agriculture sector continually force producers to adapt or alter their growing practices year to year. Annual inventories provide an information base to determine the impacts of policies and programs designed to encourage production that is beneficial to the long-term sustainability of the sector. Remote sensing watershed management in dry land agricultural areas, improving irrigation efficiency, addressing disaster management, providing farmer’s advisories and agro-meteorological services have been helpful in rejuvenation of agriculture. In this paper a feasibility study is carried out for using remote sensing satellite images for wheat crop inventory in the Indore district of Madhya Pradesh, India. After a study on availability of different imagery resources covered this area and the way of accessing such data in a good manner, LISS-III for flowering stage of wheat crop and AWiFS images from wheat sowing to harvesting is selected as the source of data. After that the image processing steps required for extracting useful information are discussed and finally a practical model is proposed that should be implemented for applying the model on the real condition. The simulation results based on prototype data and previous studies showed the effectiveness of the proposed model.