Nowadays, the comparison between sensing techniques is becoming a necessity because of the increase of sensors and methods for data acquisition. This study compared two remote sensing techniques (satellite and ground-based) as approaches describing the variation of physiological and biometric parameters of durum wheat grown under different water conditions (rainfed, deficit irrigation and full irrigation). The experimental work was carried out in Policoro (Matera) from February to June. The Landsat 8 images and ground-based remote sensing data were acquired regularly in April, May and June together with plant bio-physiological parameters. The overall results indicated no significant differences in terms of both biomass and yield among the irrigation regimes because of the abundant precipitation (355 mm) which limited the irrigation supply.
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Water Deficit Index (WDI) was strongly related to plant water status, compared to Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI). Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) showed slightly better performance than Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) when plotted against the Leaf Area Index (LAI) with R2=0.90 and 0.84, respectively. The best performance was obtained for the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) derived from satellite data with R2=0.98. Therefore, the satellite data could provide reasonable indication about the crop growth especially if applied with higher resolution.
