LIDAR MONITORING OF MOISTURE IN BIOLOGICAL OBJECTS
We demonstrate for the first time laser remote sensing of moisture in biological objects important in agriculture. The sensing was performed by a fluorescence lidar developed in Prokhorov General Physics Institute. The lidar was based on a pulsed solid state laser (527 nm, 5 ns, 1 kHz, 200 uJ) and a spectrometer equipped with a gated intensified CCD camera. Laser induced fluorescence spectra were acquired for plant biological objects of different moisture level. Sample drying was accompanied by a degradation of biological pigments which led to non-uniform growth of different spectral bands intensity in the fluorescence spectrum. We demonstrate that chlorophyll a (680 nm) and protochlorophyllide (630 nm) spectral bands ratio correlates well with the moisture of maize silage so it can be used as a metric of silage moisture for online measurements during cattle food production.