| Nitrate leaching losses from arable cropping systems cause severe damages to the environmental services worldwide. There is a considerable need for methods that allow rapid, easy and area covering detection of nitrate leaching to guide N management. We used three years of data from the 5th cycle of a long-term crop rotation experiment in Denmark to quantify the relationships between nitrate leaching in autumn and winter and field conditions in autumn as defined by three vegetation indices [VIs; Ratio Vegetation Index (RVI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Ratio Red Edge (RRE)] in autumn. Following cereal crops, catch crops significantly reduced nitrate leaching in autumn and winter, whereas this was only the case for one out of the three... |
