The team of CYENS Centre of Excellence, following the guidelines of Forschungszentrum Jülich, provided during the on-site workshop organized by JFZ in February, started their first flights in wheat fields in Cyprus!
These guidelines relate to how to properly fly the drone, safety measures, radiometric calibration of the hyperspectral sensor, data collection good practices, and others. The local experiment is happening in collaboration with PHENOTYPOS Cyprus, a strategic-infrastructures project for Cyprus, funded by Ίδρυμα Έρευνας και Καινοτομίας/Research and Innovation Foundation.
The pilot site is in Athalassa, just outside the city of Nicosia. The local partner of CYENS Centre of Excellence, Agricultural Research Institute-Cyprus
has a wheat field containing 20 different wheat lines, and the goal is to examine which wheat genotypes perform better in terms of yield, crop quality and resistance to climate changes. CYENS Centre of Excellence is performing a parallel experiment at the field, examining how drone-based sensing via hyperspectral cameras and LIDAR can be used for high-throughput phenotyping.
