Unconventional methods for assessing hail damage to crop

Professor. Kalaji’s team from the Department of Plant Physiology, Institute of Biology, SGGW, conducts research on the development of a modern and non-invasive method for assessing crop losses after hail.

A tested method is based on firing at a rapeseed plantation with an artificial hail using a pneumatic machine gun. 

So far, to destroy the research material (plants) a hail impact tester has been used. Another (theoretical) method was the use of an appropriate mathematical model.

The research concerns the development of a method for assessing crop losses, based on classical measurements (morphological changes recorded by professional claims adjusters), terrestrial signals of chlorophyll fluorescence signals (photosynthetic efficiency), multispectral imaging (drones) and remote sensing (using Sentinel-2 data ).

The research is carried out as a result of a collaboration between Professor Hazem Kalaji and Dr. hab. inż. Piotr Dąbrowski, prof. SGGW (Institute of Environmental Engineering) and companies insuring crops against losses due to climate-related disasters and weather extreme events.