Estimating the effect of urease inhibitor on rice yield based on NDVI at key growth stages

Abstract

The effect of the urease inhibitor, N-(n-butyl) thiophosphoric triamide (NBPT) at a range of application rates on rice production was examined in a field experiment at Jinxian County, Jiangxi Province, China. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was measured at key growth stages in both early and late rice. The results showed that the grain yield increased significantly when urea was applied with NBPT, with the highest yield observed at 1.00% NBPT (wt/wt). NDVI differed with the growth stage of rice; it remained steady from the heading to the filling stage. Rice yield could be predicted from the NDVI taken at key rice growing stages, with R² ranging from 0.34 to 0.69 in early rice and 0.49 to 0.70 in late rice. The validation test showed that RMSE (t·hm^-2) values were 0.77 and 0.87 in early and late rice, respectively. Therefore, it was feasible to estimate rice yield for different amounts of urease inhibitor using NDVI.

Keywords

normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) / N-(n-butyl) thiophosphoric triamide (NBPT) / rice / grain yield

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest (201203030 and 201003016), the National Basic Research Program of China (2011CB100501-S06) and Jiangxi Science and Technology Support plan (20141BBF60050). The authors thank Mr. Chungen Wang of the Jiangxi Institute of Red Soil for provision of the experimental site and facilities.

Compliance with ethics guidelinesƒKailou Liu, Yazhen Li and Huiwen Hu declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. ƒThis article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by the any of the authors.

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Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg