Abstract Over the past decades, remote sensing has evolved beyond traditional site-based methods, enabling drought monitoring and enhancing our ability to manage and mitigate its impacts through agronomic management. However, at smaller scales, such as breeding or research plot trials, the timely assessment of crop water use remains a challenge due to spatial and temporal resolution limitations. In this study, we investigated the potential to integrate climatic/satellite data with field-deployed sensing systems in the estimation of wheat crop evapotranspiration across Australia. Using National Variety Trial (NVT) sites, infrared thermometers and RGB cameras were deployed in wheat plots to characterize canopy temperature fluctuations. In 41 wheat trials, we estimated evapotranspiration on a reference cultivar using a surface energy budget approach based on sensor data, resulting in similar estimates to those obtained from APSIM simulations (R2 = 0.89). We then used an expolinear modelling approach for the estimation of transpiration efficiency (TE) and evaporation from soil (ES) from the relationship between biomass and evapotranspiration when a limited number of observations are available. We showed the environmental variation in TE across sites was explained by nitrogen and water deficits, contributing to 20% of yield variability in NVT. We emphasized that this approach has strong potential for real-time monitoring of crop water use and TE traits, especially in trials with limited monitoring and sampling frequency. Overall, these results demonstrated the feasibility of estimating water use traits in the field using sensor-driven approaches and the utility of multi-site monitoring for characterizing temporal drivers of crop performance.
Fernández et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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