Senior Research Associate Artur Gafurov aims to assess quality of agricultural lands in the Middle Volga Region

He is one of the 27 KFU employees to have won Russian Science Foundation grants in the 2022 competition.

The project is set to receive 1.5 million rubles a year for two years. The objective is to study the current condition of agricultural lands of the Middle Volga Region. For a long time now, there have been no comprehensive assessments of the total volume of lands suitable to be returned to crop circulation.

“We also intend to answer the question of the expediency of using this or that territory in agriculture. Some individual fields are clearly not in favorable conditions – high slopes, low-humus soils, types of plowing limit the possibility of planting a particular crop. Accordingly, the project will evaluate the feasibility of a particular type of land use and identify limiting factors. A separate task is to assess the lands currently used in agriculture, as well as the areas of crops planted on them. To solve this problem, high-resolution satellite images and convolutional neural networks will be used, which have proven themselves well in solving various problems related to the semantic classification of various images,” explains the researcher.

The team plans to measure the entire territory of agricultural lands, assess their feasibility for actual economic utilization, and give advice on types of land use as a result. Everything will then be posted on a free thematic map service for commercial enterprises and public administration entities.