Crop nitrogen monitoring: Recent progress and principal developments in the context of imaging spectroscopy missions

Abstract Nitrogen (N) is considered as one of the most important plant macronutrients and proper management of N therefore is a pre-requisite for modern agriculture. Continuous satellite-based monitoring of this key plant trait would help to understand individual crop N use efficiency and thus would enable site-specific N management. Since hyperspectral imaging sensors could provide detailed measurements of spectral signatures corresponding to the optical activity of chemical constituents, they have a theoretical advantage over multi-spectral sensing for the detection of crop N. The current study aims to provide a state-of-the-art overview of crop N retrieval methods from hyperspectral data…