Abstract:

The human society is entering the era of big data and data is becoming one of the key production elements. It is thus critical to develop the China's data-driving digital agriculture system, which would greatly promote the construction of digital China, stimulate the agriculture high-quality development and improve the agricultural competitiveness at the global market. To achieve this goal, strong integration of information is needed from multi-sources, multi-sensors, and multi-scales. This research, from the perspective of agricultural information science, describes the new framework of satellite, aerial, and ground integrated (SAGI) digital agriculture system for comprehensive agricultural monitoring, modeling, and management. The SAGI system differs from traditional digital agriculture systems and includes 5 important functionalities which are resource survey, production controlling, disaster monitoring, market early-warning and decision supporting. To make the system running in operation, it is necessary to first build an observation system, which integrates the satellite, aerial, and ground in-situ observation systems to capture more sophisticated, accurate and reliable data at different scales. The system is extremely needed for China, a large country with a great geographic difference, diverse agricultural cultivation and multiple agricultural traditions. This observing system helps to form the agricultural big data for subsequent data analysis and data mining. Secondly, using the big data collected, 4 key digitalization and monitoring tasks targeting at resource property right, production process, natural disaster and market status should be implemented so as to transform the data to knowledge. In this process, some diagnosis algorithms and models are developed to understand the growth and health of crops and animals, as well as their interaction with the agro-environment. With the above support, a management system covering the full range of agricultural production, processing, selling, management and services should be established to provide the rapid and reliable information support to decision-making as well to the local farming management, thereby guaranteeing agricultural sustainability and national food security. Thirdly, some key fields for future science and technology innovation to support the applications of the SAGI system should to be enhanced such as the standardization designing, innovation in technologies and instruments, system integration and platform development. Finally, considering the complicated and integrative characteristics of this SAG system, this research also proposed some recommendations such as holistic planning, science-technology innovation, resource sharing, multi-stakeholders participation, and expansion of application fields, so as to drive this idea to the reality.

Key words: aerial and ground integrated (SAGI), digital agriculture, management system, monitoring, early-warning, decision