Monitoring of cereals grain yield using fractional green canopy cover and NDVI in semi – arid region of Algeria

The variable climatic conditions pose a significant threat for food safety, affecting crop yield. To address this challenge, it is essential to establish an operational grain yield forecasting system at the beginning of the growing season. Such a system would assist decision-makers in conducting early assessments. There is a need to create easier methods to estimate crop yield, as the application of the normalized difference vegetative index (NDVI), obtained from satellite sensors and fractional green canopy cover (FGCC), derived from the Canopeo® application. This research aimed to assess and compare measurements of NDVI, FGCC, and crop biomass values across various growth stages of wheat and barley. Experimental trials were conducted over the growing seasons of 2019–2020, 2020–2021, and 2021–2022 in Setif, Algeria. The results show that FGCC the most accurate estimator for wheat and barley grain yield R² ranged from 0.781 to 0.783, surpassing crop biomass (R² ranged from 0.659 to 0.712) and NDVI (R² ranged from 0.637 to 0.642). The FGCC’s (RMSE) ranged from 0.051 to 0.107 tha⁻¹, biomass RMSE varied between 0.092 and 0.172 tha⁻¹, and NDVI RMSE fluctuated from 0.085 to 0.186 tha⁻¹. These findings suggest that the Canopeo® application proved to be a fast and reliable tool to estimate wheat and barley grain yield.