A Review of Methods for Sensing the Nitrogen Status in Plants: Advantages, Disadvantages and Recent Advances

By Rafael F. Muñoz-Huerta, R. Guevara-González, L. M. Contreras-Medina, I. Torres-Pacheco, Juan Prado-Olivarez, R. Ocampo-Velazquez. Italian National Conference on Sensors, 2013

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Nitrogen (N) plays a key role in the plant life cycle. It is the main plant mineral nutrient needed for chlorophyll production and other plant cell components (proteins, nucleic acids, amino acids). Crop yield is affected by plant N status. Thus, the optimization of nitrogen fertilization has become the object of intense research due to its environmental and economic impact. This article focuses on reviewing current methods and techniques used to determine plant N status. Kjeldahl digestion and Dumas combustion have been used as reference methods for N determination in plants, but they are destructive and time consuming. By using spectroradiometers, reflectometers, imagery from satellite sensors and digital cameras, optical properties have been measured to estimate N in plants, such as crop canopy reflectance, leaf transmittance, chlorophyll and polyphenol fluorescence. High correlation has been found between optical parameters and plant N status, and those techniques are not destructive. However, some drawbacks include chlorophyll saturation, atmospheric and soil interference, and the high cost of instruments. Electrical properties of plant tissue have been used to estimate quality in fruits, and water content in plants, as well as nutrient deficiency, which suggests that they have potential for use in plant N determination.

Subfields: Ecology, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9db02dc1eb0817f1fcd3a6cb21b0fee337dc5caf

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Citations in the corpus

RELIABILITY OF NDVI DERIVED BY HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE AND UAV COMPARED TO IN-FIELD METHODS FOR THE EVALUATION OF EARLY CROP N STATUS AND GRAIN YIELD IN WHEAT (2017, background): “As far as nitrogen (N) fertilization is concerned, the total N rate should be defined with due accuracy because it is the main factor affecting N use efficiency and thus the chance to obtain high yield with limited N loss to the environment (Muñoz-Huerta et al., 2013).”
Sentinel 2-Based Nitrogen VRT Fertilization in Wheat: Comparison between Traditional and Simple Precision Practices (2019, background): “However, increasing the N rates reduces the N uptake efficiency and increases the amount of residual N in the soil which is exposed to leaching risks [9,17].”
Sentinel‐2 accurately maps green‐attack stage of European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus, L.) compared with Landsat‐8 (2018, methodology): “Moreover, the NIR and SWIR regions have been used widely to assess water content and nitrogen concentration in plants (Carol et al. 2004; Jackson 2004; Ayala-Silva and Beyl 2005; Munoz-Huerta et al. 2013).”