Ground reference data for sugarcane biomass estimation in São Paulo state, Brazil.

Abstract

In order to make effective decisions on sustainable development, it is essential for sugarcane-producing countries to take into account sugarcane acreage and sugarcane production dynamics. The availability of sugarcane biophysical data along the growth season is key to an effective mapping of such dynamics, especially to tune agronomic models and to cross-validate indirect satellite measurements. Here, we introduce a dataset comprising 3,500 sugarcane observations collected from October 2014 until October 2015 at four fields in the São Paulo state (Brazil). The campaign included both non-destructive measurements of plant biometrics and destructive biomass weighing procedures. The acquisition plan was designed to maximize cost-effectiveness and minimize field-invasiveness, hence the non-destructive measurements outnumber the destructive ones. To compensate for such imbalance, a method to convert the measured biometrics into biomass estimates, based on the empirical adjustment of allometric models, is proposed. In addition, the paper addresses the precisions associated to the ground measurements and derived metrics. The presented growth dynamics and associated precisions can be adopted when designing new sugarcane measurement campaigns.

Plant phenotyping relevance

サトウキビのバイオメトリクスからバイオマスを推定する手法を提案し、地上測定データセットと測定精度も提示しており、植物形質の取得・推定が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's ground reference sugarcane dataset (3,500 observations of biometrics, LAI, and biomass from four fields in São Paulo state) is published openly on the 4TU Centre for Research Data repository. The authors' MATLAB analysis scripts are only available upon request, so they do not qualify as public assets.