Pre-study to develop a UAV-based monitoring tool for flowering intensity in strawberry.

In open-field strawberry cultivation, especially ever-bearing varieties, the farmer needs information on the flowering intensity. The number of flowers per plant can easily be translated to expected number of fruits through well-known relations between initial flowering intensity and final yield. This information will enable the grower to optimize its management decisions. Moreover auctions or other sales organisations can make longer-term commitments to their customers as to the quantities they can deliver in the upcoming weeks. In current practices flowers are counted manually, which has proven to be a very time-consuming, expensive and subjective operation. Given the simplicity of the cropping system and the high visibility of the flowers, this operation can be automated through the employment of high-resolution sensors on-board of remotely piloted aerial systems. The prestudy will elucidate potential hurdles caused by the legislation of flying RPAS, as well as the determination of the number of fields (distribution, size) required to make one UAV flight viable. In the prestudy we will list scenarios in which extrapolation of data (sensing on a selected number of fields, which serve for overall recommendations) is possible or not. Finally, the prestudy will list the technical and scientific challenges related to the sensing (variance, precision, …), data-acquisition, data processing and decision support systems.