Remote sensing and GIS application in agriculture and natural resource management economics

Agricultural production systems are highly vulnerable to variations in climate, soil and topography of different regions. For sustainable agricultural management, all these factors need to be analyzed on spatio-temporal basis. The advanced techniques like remote sensing, global positioning system and geographical information system can be of great use for their assessment and management. Remote sensing and GIS are very important tools having wide range of applications to tackle these issues. These technologies have manifold applications in agriculture including crop discrimination, crop growth monitoring/ stress detection, crop inventory, soil moisture estimation, computation of crop evapo-transpiration, site-specific management/ precision agriculture, crop acreage estimation and yield prediction. Timely and reliable information on crop acreage, growth condition and yield estimation can be highly beneficial to the producers, managers and policy planners for taking tactical decisions regarding food security, import/export and economic impact. Such information on regional basis can be made available with the use of remote sensing and GIS techniques. Remote sensing and GIS can also be used very effectively in land use/ land cover analysis as well as damage assessment because of drought, floods and other extreme weather events An attempt has been made in the present study to review, analyses and evaluate the latest information regarding the application of remote sensing techniques for crop monitoring, crop condition assessment and yield estimation for sustainability of agriculture and natural resources under changing climatic scenarios. Remote sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) offers an abundant opportunity to monitor and manage natural resources at multi-temporal, multi-spectral and multi-spatial resolution. It is an urgent need to understand the specialized capabilities of an ever-expanding array of image sources and analysis techniques for natural resource managers. In this review, we compile the various applications of remote sensing and GIS tools that can be used for natural resource management and economic. The information is useful for the natural resource managers to understand and more effectively collaborate with remote sensing scientists to develop and apply remote sensing science to achieve monitoring objectives.