Special Issue on "Smart Agriculture"
It is the era of smart agriculture. With the process of civilization, the agricultural population is decreasing dramatically in countries such as China and India, nevertheless USA and European countries. Many digital farming technologies and unmanned farms have been practiced. Sensing technology and intelligent agricultural machinery are playing the most important roles in enhancing field management efficiency in these practices.
Sensing technology is one of the key approaches to generating precise spatial and temporal information on crops or livestock. Various types of sensors combined with satellite, UAV or ground-based platforms have been used for the awareness of growth status, nutrition state, and environmental parameters. Besides, sensor techniques are also efficient tools for the recognition, monitoring, and evaluation of stresses on plants or animals. These stresses can be water deficit, soil salinity, nutrition deficiency, high/low temperature, extreme radiation, wind, air pollution, and pests including weeds, insects, and pathogens. On the other hand, artificial intelligence technology has brought us to a new era of machine learning. Its high recognition accuracy enables more precise plant and pest identification, which can be of great significance for the application capability of sensors and precision agricultural systems such as mechanical weed control, UAV spraying, and precision fertilization.
Modern farm management systems include both precise sensing strategies and accurate application devices. Thus, the application of monitoring and management robots can lead to better growth uniformity of crops and animals. However, mechanical management strategies may also bring stress to the biological agents. For instance, mechanical weeders may harm the crops’ root system, repeated crushing by the wheels may damage the soil structure, pesticide drift may injure the non-target crops in the nearby fields, etc. Hence, the machine-plant and machine-animal systems can be optimized using real-time autonomous decision algorithms.
We are therefore organizing a special issue of Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (FASE, http://journal.hep.com.cn/fase) entitled “Smart Agriculture”. As a rapidly developing interdisciplinary subject, smart agriculture demands holistic research from multiple disciplines.
The special issue invites submission of original and innovative papers as well as reviews and opinion pieces relevant to smart agriculture such as:
1. Agricultural artificial intelligence (digitalization, etc.)
2. Agricultural equipment (mechanization, automation, etc.)
3. Unmanned farm
4. Intelligent field management (pest monitoring, water and fertilizer integration, etc.)
5. Agricultural robotics
6. Agricultural remote sensing
7. Agricultural sensors and information sensing (non-destructive testing, machine vision, etc.)
8. Agricultural IoT and big data
9. Phenotypic analysis of plants and animals
10. Plant factory (vertical agriculture, etc.)
11. Agricultural security and resilience (disaster monitoring and prediction, yield forecasting, etc.)
12. Climate-smart agriculture
13. Smart cities and agricultural transportation (logistics, supply chains, transportation, etc.)
14. Agricultural traceability
15. Ecology and dual carbon (carbon capture, carbon-nitrogen cycle, nutrition, etc.) and all other relevant topics
FASE collects innovative papers that advance the understanding of scientific, technological/engineering, socio-economic, institutional/policy, and management factors that drive current and future agricultural productivity and sustainability globally. It is an open-access journal published quarterly with no page charges. The impact factor published in 2023 is 3.7, ranking Q1 region in the field of Agronomy. The Editor-in-Chief of FASE is Academician Prof. Fusuo Zhang, based at China Agricultural University. The associate Editors-in-Chief comprise Hans Lambers from the University of Western Australia, Shenggen Fan and Yaofeng Zhao from China Agricultural University, Oene Oenema from Wageningen University, William J. Davies from Lancaster University, and Peter Vitousek from Stanford University. All submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by experts of international standing.
In view of your international standing as a research scientist, we cordially invite you to write a review or research paper for this special issue related to one of the topics listed above with a due date of 15 May 2024. We look forward to receiving a positive response and a one-page abstract from you before you start to draft the article. Please submit your manuscripts through the FASE online submission system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/fase and marked the “Special Issue: Smart Agriculture” in your letter or manuscript. The editors will strive to complete the first review process within 1–2 weeks and give you a quick response.
Guest Editors:
Hui Liu
Deputy Dean, Central South University, China
Professor, Central South University, China
csuliuhui@csu.edu.cn
School of Traffic & Tranportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China
Yu Zhang
Research Scientist, Research Center for Agricultural Information Technology, National Agricultural Food Research Organization
heroyu2019@outlook.com
Core Technology Research Headquarters, National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, 1-31-1 Kannondai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0856, Japan
Pei Wang
Interdisciplinary Research Center for Agriculture Green Development in Yangtze River Basin
Associate Professor , Southwest University
peiwang@swu.edu.cn
College of Engineering and Technology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China