Model for estimation of total nitrogen content in sandalwood leaves based on nonlinear mixed effects and dummy variables using multispectral images

Abstract: Fertilizer overuse is a common phenomenon in global agroforestry production, and this overuse causes ecological destruction. The ability to accurately estimate the nutrient content of plant leaves in real-time would be a wonderful solution to reduce the degree of environmental damage. In recent years, remote sensing technology has been widely used in the diagnosis of crop nutrition in many countries. Most studies focus on optimal band se- lection or create new vegetation indices, but these studies have ignored the random impact of natural environ- mental factors on the estimated results. This paper proposed an estimation model of total nitrogen content (TNC) in sandalwood leaves that takes sampling season and site conditions as the dummy variable and random effect, respectively. Three forestry farms with different locations and site conditions were selected as study areas to enhance the universality of this model. Multispectral images of leaves were obtained using a low-cost five-band camera (RedEdge3, MicaSense, USA), and the experimental results indicate the following: (1) the growth of the tree height, crown width and stem effectively increased under the medium gradient level (N2), whereas a high gradient level (N3) significantly promoted all aspects except tree height; (2) the mean and variance of some image texture features of the G, RE and NIR band were significantly correlated with TNC at the 0.05 and 0.01 levels, and the texture mean value index (TMVI) proposed in this paper can improve the correlation with TNC; and (3) the results obtained using the nonlinear mixed-effects model with dummy variables improved the fitting degree and estimation accuracy compared with results of SVR and BPNN. This study demonstrates the advantages of using the nonlinear mixed-effects model with dummy variables to obtain a more reliable estimation model for the nutri- tional diagnosis of rare tree species.

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Authors: Zhulin Chen, Xuefeng Wang

Associations: Beijing Normal University