Pietro Mattivi

Weeds are one of the major issues in agricultural production and they are present in most agricultural systems. Due to the heterogeneity of weed distribution, understanding spatial patterns is paramount for precision farming and improving sustainability in crop management. Nevertheless, limited information is currently available about the differences between conventional agricultural (CV) weed spatial patterns and weed spatial patterns in conservation agricultural systems (CA); moreover, opportunities to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and recognition algorithms to monitor these differences are still being explored and tested. In this work, the opportunity to use UAVs to detect changes in spatial distribution over time between CA and CV fields was assessed for data acquisition. Acquired data were processed using maximum likelihood classification to discriminate between weeds and surrounding elements; then, a similarity assessment was performed using the ‘equal to’ function of the raster calculator. The results show important differences in spatial distribution over time between CA and CV fields. In the CA field 56.18% of the area was infested in both years when the field margin effect was included, and 22.53% when this effect was excluded; on the other hand, in the CV field only 11.50% of the area was infested in both years. The results illustrate that there are important differences in the spatial distribution of weeds between CA and CV fields; such differences can be easily detected using UAVs and identification algorithms combined.

Weed management is a crucial issue in agriculture, resulting in environmental in-field and off-field impacts. Within Agriculture 4.0, adoption of UASs combined with spatially explicit approaches may drastically reduce doses of herbicides, increasing sustainability in weed management. However, Agriculture 4.0 technologies are barely adopted in small-medium size farms. Recently, small and low-cost UASs, together with open-source software packages, may represent a low-cost spatially explicit system to map weed distribution in crop fields. The general aim is to map weed distribution by a low-cost UASs and a replicable workflow, completely based on open GIS software and algorithms: OpenDroneMap, QGIS, SAGA and OpenCV classification algorithms. Specific objectives are: (i) testing a low-cost UAS for weed mapping; (ii) assessing open-source packages for semi-automatic weed classification; (iii) performing a sustainable management scenario by prescription maps. Results showed high performances along the whole process: in orthomosaic generation at very high spatial resolution (0.01 m/pixel), in testing weed detection (Matthews Correlation Coefficient: 0.67–0.74), and in the production of prescription maps, reducing herbicide treatment to only 3.47% of the entire field. This study reveals the feasibility of low-cost UASs combined with open-source software, enabling a spatially explicit approach for weed management in small-medium size farmlands.