Kolloquium Geoinformatik Smartphones vs. LiDAR for agricultural monitoring: A Participatory Sensing approach to derive 3D Crop Height Models

Since a growing number of people all over the world are carrying smartphones or tablets, data collection via geolocation-aware mobile applications has brought new opportunities for agricultural monitoring in low-resource settings. The integration of participatory sensing provides valuable information and could be beneficial to deepen the understanding of complex phenomena such as malnutrition and climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa. The strengths and limitations of participatory sensing for deriving 3D crop height models are pointed out in this talk. Students were instructed to collect the underlying geoinformation on plant properties (e.g. height, density) within a maize field in Heidelberg using smartphones and GPS devices. The results are benchmarked against highly-detailed information from a terrestrial laser scanner. Although this approach is limited e.g. due to location inaccuracies, the incorporation of human observation provides interesting perspectives for gathering agricultural data from smallholder farmers on a small-scale.