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Acta Prataculturae Sinica ›› 2020, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (2): 172-185.DOI: 10.11686/cyxb2019207

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Hyperspectral remote sensing progress for forage nutritional quality and quantity in natural grassland

GAO Jin-long, LIU Jie, YIN Jian-peng, GE Jing, HOU Meng-jing, FENG Qi-sheng, LIANG Tian-gang*   

  1. State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-Ecosystem, Key Laboratory of Grassland Livestock Industry Innovation, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Pastoral Agriculture Science and Technology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730020, China
  • Received:2019-03-25 Revised:2019-07-08 Online:2020-02-20 Published:2020-02-20
  • Contact: E-mail: tgliang@lzu.edu.cn

Abstract: Evaluation of the nutritional quality and quantity of natural grassland forage is central in the optimization of grassland animal husbandry systems, and provides important information to enhance the quality of animal products and growth and development of livestock. Therefore, rapid and accurate estimates of forage nutrient content will greatly assist the rational utilization and effective management of natural alpine grassland. The rapid development of hyperspectral remote sensing technology shows promise of providing a tool for the dynamic monitoring and evaluation of grassland forage nutrition quality and quantity. This paper reviews the available hyperspectral remote sensing systems, such as Hyperion, the compact high resolution imaging spectrometer (CHRIS), RapidEye, WorldView-2, Sentinel-2, HJ-1A hyper-spectrum imager (HSI), Tiangong-1, Gaofen-5 and Gaofen-6. We suggest that research progress in grassland nutrition will be greatly improved by making full use of these available data gathering resources. The commonly used remote sensing inversion methods for forage nutrient composition of natural grassland include traditional multivariate statistical analysis, regression analysis based on spectral features and spectral indexes, and physical modeling. Previous studies of the estimation and evaluation of key nutrients in forage focused on analysis of hyperspectral characteristics, spatial-temporal inversion models, spectral band selection and local area nutrient mapping. It is emphasized that the following issues remain: difficulties accessing data, lack of relevant research and performance deficiencies of existing software and hardware. Given the multiple observation platforms and related technology innovations, an important research direction is to improve the performance of hyperspectral instruments, and to improve the inversion accuracy of algorithms for determining key nutrients in future. Moreover, aerial and satellite data can be integrated to monitor the temporal and spatial nutritional changes at a landscape level in in natural grasslands and such integration thus represents a promising future development trend.

Key words: natural grassland, forage nutrition, quality, hyperspectral remote sensing, progress