Monitoring sugarcane and waterlogging with a multi-sensor approach for sustainable agriculture

Satellite sensors have been promoted widely as a technology to monitor crop canopies to encourage sustainable agriculture. Different remote sensing technologies are able to detect crop stress and water shortages, with a special emphasis on water stress. Improving water and crop productivity goes hand in hand. Moreover, crop stress resulting from waterlogging leads to suboptimal crop productivity. However, this has so far received little attention in literature and, consequently, technological development. This is surprising because approximately twenty percent of the global agricultural land suffers from the consequences of waterlogging and secondary soil salinization.

In this study we focus on an irrigated sugarcane plantation in southern Mozambique burdened by waterlogging. We show how Sentinel-1 backscatter and Planet NDVI can be used to monitor sugarcane development. Our results demonstrate Sentinel-1 backscatter is able to monitor sucrose development and, in addition, how waterlogging influences the radar signals in different growth stages. Consequently, we show the potential to monitor sugarcane development and waterlogging simultaneously.