Monitoring of Soil moisture and water-flooded areas for agriculture and environment

The MISTRALE project proposes to address soils moisture management in agriculture as well as wetlands or flooded areas monitoring by using Global Navigation Satellite Systems reflected signals (GNSS-R) as a powerful technology for humidity or flooded mapping.

Objectives

The detection by GNSS-R is known to be much more reliable than visible/NIR imagery, and will be usable even under a cloud cover, during the night and even under vegetation (bushes, grass, trees) when passive remote sensing is not applicable. The main objective is to demonstrate a service chain in different use cases: pilot projects will be carried out in soil humidity mapping for agriculture (optimizing the water resource management), wetlands and flooded areas (risk management, flood-prone areas, damages evaluation). In order to meet the objectives, a GNSS-R receiver embedded into a small RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft System) will be developed and implemented into an operational chain to provide the service.

The overarching aim of the MISTRALE project is to reach the commercialisation of a service providing soil moisture maps. To achieve that, MISTRALE will develop and demonstrate a prototype of GNSS Reflectometry (GNSS-R) sensor embedded on a dedicated Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) platform for measuring soil moisture using the GNSS reflected signature.