Use of Drones and Satellite Images to Assess the Health of Date Palm Trees

Remote sensing techniques using drones platforms have been suggested as a potential detection method for plants diseases as it allows for large scale monitoring and effective data analysis techniques. There are 7.6 million date palm trees currently planted in the farms in Oman covering an area of 23241 hectares or 35% of total agricultural area in the Sultanate in addition to 0.9 million palm trees planted in homes or for landscaping in public parks and alongside the roads. Hence, date palm is considered as plant number one in the country with total production of around 317 million kg of dates. However, date palm trees in the Sultanate are under threat due to the spread of pests including red palm weevil. The main objective of this study was to precisely identify infested date palm trees using airborne remote sensing tools including VHR satellite images and Unmanned Vehicles Aircraft (Drone). This study aimed to explore the potential of airborne remote sensing datasets of multispectral and high-resolution RGB images, to diagnose date palms infested with pests for the study area within and around SQU AES farm. The preliminary analysis resulted in finding a new serious disease started to affect the date palm trees in the study area. We were able to determine its unique spectral signature and by which infected plants were identified over a large scale area using determined signature and the drone based aerial images.