Agricultural disasters are the adverse reaction of crop to environmental conditions that are unfavorable to their growth, such as drought, flooding, extreme temperatures, disease and insect infestation. With the advancement of the agricultural information technology, remote sensing system, and advances in data analysis techniques, these drivers have inspired new thinking and impetus to the agricultural disasters monitoring. Aiming to generalize the knowledge and provide perspectives for remote sensing of agricultural disasters, this paper had summarized data functionalities, data processing methodologies and recent advances of agricultural remote sensing. Literatures on remote sensing of agricultural disasters monitoring were then reviewed. Judging from the development trend, agricultural remote sensing had been significantly benefit from rapid development of information technologies, availability of multi-source data, Precision Agriculture equipment, and the integration with physical model. These advances suggested many opportunities and challenges for remote sensing in agricultural disasters monitoring. The development for remote sensing of agricultural disasters should be paid more attention to the following aspects: (1) fully understanding the merit of remote sensing; (2) quantifying and validating of disasters monitoring; (3) strengthening early warning capability; (4) fusing multi-sources data; (5) bridging the gaps between experimental studies and practical applications....
Authors: Zhuokun Pan, Jingfeng Huang, Chuanwen Wei, Hankui Zhang.