Satellite derived seasonal cropping pattern, experiments on yield estimation, rainfall assessment for irrigation requirement, soil cover, weather extreme, estimation of net-sown crop area and agricultural drought assessment studies are conducted. At present, studies on applicability and development of new techniques and methodologies are in progress for providing space inputs for Crop Insurance Decision Support System (CIDSS), crop intensification, mapping and inventory and assessment of high value crops, horticulture inventory, agricultural drought vulnerability assessment, soil-vegetation-atmosphere flux studies over different agro-ecosystems, pilot studies on hyper spectral remote sensing applications for crop condition assessment.
The future vision of agriculture applications is - Crop Surveillance Systems, local to regional scales, customized information through user friendly Dashboards for Multi-purpose Decision Support.
The Pradhan Mantri Fasal BimaYojana (PMFBY) is a national flagship Programme for providing crop insurance in the country. NRSC is carrying out geomatics based studies towards improving the area-yield estimates, a key input to the development of methodologies for crop insurance mechanism. Methodologies were developed and tested at state level for Odisha. Generation of homogeneous insurance units (with village as unit) with reduced basis risk, investigation on crop yield estimation methods in Insurance Units, suggestion of improved methods for yield estimation are the primary contributions. Crop Insurance Decision Support System (CIDSS) is being developed through a web-enabled integrated package for States. This will improve efficiency and transparency in crop insurance mechanism by enabling objective decision making, sampling design for yield estimation, generating yield estimates in the insurance units. Mobile applications are developed for crowd sourcing for field data collection, Crop Cutting Experiments (CCE) and crop damage assessment through Bhuvan Portal.
India grows 36 Mha of rice crop in kharif season in India. This is important contribution to food production in India as rice is the main food crop. It is observed that about 30% of this area is left fallow after the harvest of rice crop. Mapping and monitoring of post-kharif rice fallow lands using satellite data will help identification of suitable areas for intensification of rabi crop area. Kharif rice areas in conjunction with subsequent rabi crop areas have been compared to arrive at the fallow lands left uncultivated in rabi season. These areas have been analyzed along with corresponding soil and climate parameters to assess their suitability for cultivating short duration pulses during subsequent rabi season. Sub district level spatial level information is generated and studied for the assessment of crop intensification in major rice-growing states of India namely Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal. The aim of this project is to provide an estimate of spatial extent and distribution of post kharif rice – rabi fallows, and also their suitability for growing short duration pulses.
Mobile applications are deployed for seasonal field data collection for geo-tagging the crop scenario.Information is available on Bhuvan-Crop intensification portal which is useful for decision makers, extension agencies and researchers.
