Sown Biodiverse Pastures (SBP) are the basis of a high-yield grazing system tailored for Mediterranean ecosystems and widely implemented in Southern Portugal. The application of precision farming methods in SBP requires cost-effective monitoring using remote sensing (RS). The main hurdle for the remote monitoring of SBP is the fact that the bulk of the pastures are installed in open Montado agroforestry systems. Sparsely distributed trees cast shadows that hinder the identification of the underlaying pasture using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) imagery. Image acquisition in the Spring is made difficult by the presence of flowers that mislead the classification algorithms. Here, we tested multiple procedures for the geographical, object-based image classification (GEOBIA) of SBP, aiming to reduce the effects of tree shadows and flowers in open Montado systems. We used remotely sensed data acquired between November 2017 and May 2018 in three Portuguese farms. We used three machine learning supervised classification algorithms: Random Forests (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). We classified SBP based on: (1) a single-period image for the maximum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) epoch in each of the three farms, and (2) multi-temporal image stacking. RF, SVM and ANN were trained using some visible (red, green and blue bands) and near-infrared (NIR) reflectance bands, plus NDVI and a Digital Surface Model (DSM). We obtained high overall accuracy and kappa index (higher than 79% and 0.60, respectively). The RF algorithm had the highest overall accuracy (more than 92%) for all farms. Multitemporal image classification increased the accuracy of the algorithms. as it helped to correctly identify as SBP the areas covered by tree shadows and flower patches, which would be misclassified using single image classification. This study thus established the first workflow for SBP monitoring based on remotely sensed data, suggesting an operational approach for SBP identification. The workflow can be applied to other types of pastures in agroforestry regions to reduce the effects of shadows and flowering in classification problems.

Accurate crop data are essential for reliable irrigation water requirements (IWR) calculations, which can be acquired during the crop growth season for a given region using earth observation (EO) satellite time series. In addition, a relationship between crop coefficients and the NDVI can be established to allow for crop evapotranspiration estimation. The main objective of the present work was to develop a methodology, and its implementation in an application software, to extract crop parameters from EO image time series for a set of parcels of different types of crops, to be used as input data for a soil water balance model to compute IWR. The methodology was tested at two distinct test sites, the Vila Franca de Xira (site I) and Vila Velha de Ródão (site II) municipalities, Portugal. Landsat-7 and-8 images acquired from April to October 2013 were used for site I, while SPOT-5 Take-5 images from April to September 2015 were considered for site II. EO data were used to estimate the basal crop coefficients, planting dates, and crops growth stage lengths. Based on crop, soil and meteorological data, the IWR for the main crops of both test regions were estimated using the IrrigRotation model. The crop coefficient curves obtained from the EO data proved to be reliable for IWR estimation.

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<p>In Portugal, beef cattle are commonly fed with a mixture of grazing and forages/concentrate feed. Sown biodiverse permanent pastures rich in legumes (SBP) were introduced to provide quality animal feed and offset concentrate consumption. SBP also sequester large amounts of carbon in soils. They use biodiversity to promote pasture productivity, supporting a more than doubling in sustainable stocking rate, with several potential environmental co-benefits besides carbon sequestration in soils.<br>Here, we develop and test the combination of remote sensing and machine learning approaches to predict the most relevant production parameters of plant and soil. For the plants, we included pasture yield, nitrogen and phosphorus content, and species composition (legumes, grasses and forbs). In the soil, we included soil organic matter content, as well as nitrogen and phosphorus content. For soils, hyperspectral data were obtained in the laboratory using previously collected soil samples (in near-infrared wavelengths). Remotely sensed multispectral data was acquired from the Sentinel-2 satellite. We also calculated several vegetation indexes. The machine learning algorithms used were artificial neural networks and random forests regressions. We used data collected in late winter/spring from 14 farms (more than 150 data samples) located in the Alentejo region, Portugal.<br>The models demonstrated a good prediction capacity with r-squared (r2) higher than in 0.70 for most of the variables and both spectral datasets. Estimation error decreases with proximity of the spectral data acquisition, i.e. error is lower using hyperspectral datasets than Sentinel-2 data. Further, results not shown systematic overestimation and/or underestimation. The fit is particularly accurate for yield and organic matter, higher than 0.80. Soil organic matter content has the lowest standard estimation error (3 g/kg soil – average SOM: 20 g/kg soil), while the legumes fraction has the highest estimation error (20% legumes fraction).<br>Results show that a move towards automated monitoring (combining proximal or remote sensing data and machine learning methods) can lead to expedited and low-cost methods for mapping and assessment of variables in sown biodiverse pastures.</p>