Digital terrain model (DTM) generation is essential to recreating terrain morphology once the external elements are removed. Traditional survey methods are still used to collect accurate geographic data on the land surface. Given the emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with low-cost digital cameras and better photogrammetric methods for digital mapping, efficient approaches are necessary to allow rapid land surveys with high accuracy. This paper provides a review, complemented with the authors’ experience, regarding the UAV photogrammetric process and field survey parameters for DTM generation using popular commercial photogrammetric software to process images obtained with fixed-wing or multicopter UAVs. We analyzed the quality and accuracy of the DTMs based on four categories: (i) the UAV system (UAV platforms and camera); (ii) flight planning and image acquisition (flight altitude, image overlap, UAV speed, orientation of the flight line, camera configuration, and georeferencing); (iii) photogrammetric DTM generation (software, image alignment, dense point cloud generation, and ground filtering); (iv) geomorphology and land use/cover. For flat terrain, UAV photogrammetry provided a horizontal root mean square error (RMSE) between 1 to 3 × the ground sample distance (GSD) and a vertical RMSE between 1 to 4.5 × GSD, and, for complex topography, a horizontal RMSE between 1 to 7 × GSD and a vertical RMSE between 1.5 to 5 × GSD. Finally, we stress that UAV photogrammetry can provide DTMs with high accuracy when the photogrammetric process variables are optimized.

The vegetation fraction (VF) monitoring in a specific area is a very important parameter for precision agriculture. Until a few years ago, high-cost flights on aeroplanes and satellite imagery were the only option to acquire data to estimate VF remotely. Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a novel and economic tool to supply high-resolution images useful to estimate VF. VF is usually estimated by spectral indices using red-green-blue (RGB) and near-infrared (NIR) bands data. For this study, a UAV equipped with both kinds of sensors (RGB and NIR) was used to obtain high-resolution imagery over a maize field in progressive dates along the mid-season and the senescence development stages. The early-season stage was also monitored using only RGB spectral indices. Flights were performed at 52 m over the terrain, obtaining RGB images of 1.25 cm pixel⁻¹ and multispectral images of 2.10 cm pixel⁻¹. Three spectral indices in the visible region, Excess Green (ExG), Colour Index of Vegetation (CIVE), and Vegetation Index Green (VIg), and three NIR-based vegetation indices, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Green NDVI (GNDVI), and Normalized Green (NG), were evaluated for VF estimation. Otsu’s method was applied to automatically determine the threshold value to classify the vegetation coverage. Results show that ExG presents the higher mean accuracy (85.66%) among all the visible indices, with values ranging from 72.54% to 99.53%, having its best performance in the earlier development stage. Nevertheless, GNDVI mean accuracy (97.09%) overcomes all the indices (visible and multispectral), ranging in value from 92.71% to 99.36%. This allowed comparing the accuracy difference gained by using a NIR sensor, with a higher economic cost than required using a simple RGB sensor. The results suggest that ExG can be a very suitable option to monitor VF in the early-season growth stage of the crop, while later stages could require NIR-based indices. Thus, the selection of the index will depend on the objectives of the study and the equipment capacity.

Torrential rainfall can generate landslides, flash floods, and debris flows which might become disasters, causing loss of life and damage to property and infrastructure. To respond opportunely to hydrometeorological hazards, it is necessary to assess, rapidly and accurately, damage to the affected area. This is commonly done through time-consuming reconnaissance visits to obtain detailed field information. This paper proposes a methodology which uses: i) high resolution satellite and RGB images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), ii) digital elevation models (DEM), and iii) object-based image analysis (OBIA) for rapid urban flood damage assessment and estimation of the number of houses washed away, or with a total or partial roof collapse, by comparing pre- and post-event data. The case study was Tropical Storm Earl in 2016 that affected the town of Chicahuaxtla, Puebla, Mexico, due to the overflow of the Zempoloantongo River that cuts through the town causing several loss of life and severe property damage. The results indicate that the three-pronged approach proposed herein is able to discriminate changes before and after the event and improve image classification of washed-away or destroyed houses. The overall accuracy of the proposed automatic classification obtained with UAV data had a value of 97.4%. Structural damage was not assessed in this study.

The vegetation indices (VIs) estimated from remotely sensed data are simple and based on effective algorithms for quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the dynamics of biophysical crop variables such as vegetation cover, leaf area, vigor and development, and many others. Over the last decade, many VIs have been proposed and validated to enhance the vegetation signal by reducing the noise from effects produced either by the soil or by vegetation such as brightness, shadows, color, etc. VIs are commonly calculated from satellite images such as ones from Landsat and Sentinel-2 because of their medium resolution and free availability. However, despite the VIs being fairly simple algorithms, it can take hours to calculate them for an established agricultural area, mainly due to the pre-processing of the images (including atmospheric corrections, the detection of clouds and shadows), size and download time of the images, and the capacity of the computer equipment used. Time increases as the number of images increases. In this sense, the free to use Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform was here used to develop an application called VICAL to calculate 23 VIs map (VIs commonly used in agricultural applications) and time series of any agricultural area in the world with images (cloud-free) from Landsat and Sentinel-2 data. It was found that VICAL can calculate these 23 VIs accurately, and shows the potential of the GEE cloud-based tools using multispectral dataset to assess many spectral VIs. This tool is very beneficial for researchers with poor access to satellite data or in institutions with a lack of computational infrastructure to handle the large volumes of satellite datasets, since it is not necessary for the user writing a single line of code. The VICAL is open-access image analysis platform that can be modified to carry out more complex analysis or adapt it to a specific VI application.

Water scarcity for agriculture is increasingly evident due to climatic alterations and inadequate management of this resource. Therefore, developing digital models that help improve water resource management to provide solutions to agronomic problems in northern Mexico is necessary. In this context, the objective of the present research is to calibrate the Optical Trapezoid (OPTRAM) and Thermal-Optical Trapezoid (TOTRAM) models to estimate the volumetric soil moisture at different depths through vegetation indices derived from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellite images using Google Earth Engine (GEE). Agricultural areas under gravity irrigation and rainfed runoff in the Comarca Lagunera, the lower part of the Hydrological Region No. 36 of the Nazas and Aguanaval rivers were selected for in-situ measurements. The OPTRAM and TOTRAM normalized moisture content (W) estimates were compared with in-situ volumetric soil moisture (Ɵ) data. Results indicate that the predictions of OPTRAM errors using Sentinel-2 images showed RMSE between 0.033 to 0.043 cm3 cm-3 and R2 between 0.66 to 0.75, whereas Landsat-8 errors showed RSME from 0.036 to from 0.036 to 0.057 cm3 cm-3 and R2 between 0.70 to 0.81. On the other hand, TOTRAM errors showed RMSE between 0.045 to 0.053 cm3 cm-3 and R2 between 0.62 to 0.85 through calibrations. This study made it possible to evaluate the most accurate combinations of the pixel distributions of each model and vegetation indices for the estimation of volumetric soil moisture within the different phenological stages of the crops.

Remote sensing-based crop monitoring has evolved unprecedentedly to supply multispectral imagery with high spatial-temporal resolution for the assessment of crop evapotranspiration (ETc). Several methodologies have shown a high correlation between the Vegetation Indices (VIs) and the crop coefficient (Kc). This work analyzes the estimation of the crop coefficient (Kc) as a spectral function of the product of two variables: VIs and green vegetation cover fraction (f_v). Multispectral images from experimental maize plots were classified to separate pixels into three classes (vegetation, shade and soil) using the OBIA (Object Based Image Analysis) approach. Only vegetation pixels were used to estimate the VIs and f_v variables. The spectral Kc_fv:VI models were compared with Kc based on Cumulative Growing Degree Days (CGDD) (Kc-c_GDD). The maximum average values of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), WDRVI, amd EVI2 indices during the growing season were 0.77, 0.21, and 1.63, respectively. The results showed that the spectral Kc_fv:VI model showed a strong linear correlation with Kc-c_GDD (R² > 0.80). The model precision increases with plant densities, and the Kc_fv:NDVI with 80,000 plants/ha had the best fitting performance (R² = 0.94 and RMSE = 0.055). The results indicate that the use of spectral models to estimate Kc based on high spatial and temporal resolution UAV-images, using only green pixels to compute VI and f_v crop variables, offers a powerful and simple tool for ETc assessment to support irrigation scheduling in agricultural areas.