The use of diagnostic optical tools to assess nitrogen status and to guide fertilization of vegetables

Dynamic fertilization management is a way of bringing nutrients to the plant when they are crucial for its development. However, destructive measurements of crop nitrogen (N) status are still too costly and time consuming to justify their use, and the implementation of methodologies based upon non-destructive, quick and easy to use tools for plant nutritional status monitoring appears as an appealing opportunity. Several optical tools for plant monitoring have been developed in recent years and many studies have assessed their ability to discriminate plant N status. Such tools can measure at leaf level (hand-held optical instruments) or may consider the canopy of a plant or few plants (portable radiometers) or even measure areas, such as a field, a farm or a region (aerial photography). The application of vegetation indices, which combine the readings at different wavelengths, may improve the reliability of the collected data, giving a more precise determination of the plant nutritional status. In this paper we report on the state of the art of the available optical tools for plant N status monitoring.