The informativeness of vegetation indices as predictors of the yield of two spring wheat varieties in an experiment with a plant protection system against the background of fertilizers

Abstract

The use of a combined assessment of the informational significance of vegetation indices for predicting the yield of spring wheat, taking into account varietal specificity and agrotechnical factors, has been studied. The test site was the field experience in the forest-steppe zone of the Novosibirsk Priobye. In the experiment, spring wheat of the Suenga and Novosibirsk 41 varieties was cultivated using intensive agricultural technology. For the analysis, data obtained using the DJI Phantom 4 Multispectral Phantom unmanned aerial vehicle during the crop growing period in 2023–2025 were used. Vegetation index values were calculated using five spectral channels: blue (B, 450 ± 16 nm), green (G, 560 ± 16), red (R, 650 ± 16), red edge (RE, 730 ± 16) and near-infrared (NIR, 840 ± 26 nm). For the analysis of informational importance, the following indices were used as predictors of crop yield: NDVI, NDWI, GNDVI, LAI, CVI, GCI, and ChlRE. For assessing the informativeness of the indices, independent methods were used: the F-statistic of one-way regression (ANOVA F-test), evaluation of mutual information (Mutual Information, MI), and feature importance of the random forest algorithm (Random Forest, RF). Each of the scores was normalized in the range [0; 1] using the min-max normalization method, after which a combined score was calculated as a weighted sum. For the Suenga variety, the stable predictors regardless of the experimental variants were CVI (tillering) and ChlRE (stem elongation and heading), while for Novosibirsk 41, the set of informative predictors significant ly depended on the combination of plant protection and fertilizer systems. It was found that chlorophyll content indices (GCI, ChlRE) increased the predictive relationship with yield under fertilization, while the water status index (NDWI) lost informativeness when fertilizers were applied.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAVマルチスペクトル画像から植生指数を抽出し、複数の統計・機械学習手法を統合して小麦収量予測における指標の有用性を評価しており、植物形質推定ワークフローが中心です。

Code and data availability

The article describes UAV multispectral imagery (DJI Phantom 4), 12 orthomosaics, a 4320-value dataset, and Python-based analysis (ANOVA F-test, mutual information, random forest), but contains no data or code availability statement, no public deposit, and no author-provided URL to any dataset, imagery, or scripts. The

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