The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of using Multiplex 3, a hand-held canopy fluorescence sensor, to determine rice nitrogen (N) status at different growth stages. In 2013, a paddy rice field experiment with five N fertilizer treatments and two varieties was conducted in Northeast China. Field samples and fluorescence data were collected simultaneously at the panicle initiation (PI), stem elongation (SE), and heading (HE) stages. Four N status indicators, leaf N concentration (LNC), plant N concentration (PNC), plant N uptake (PNU) and N nutrition index (NNI), were determined. The preliminary results indicated that different N application rates significantly affected most of the fluorescence variables, especially the simple fluorescence ratios (SFR_G, SFR_R), flavonoid (FLAV), and N balance indices (NBI_G, NBI_R). These variables were highly correlated with N status indicators. More studies are needed to further evaluate the accuracy of rice N status diagnosis using fluorescence sensing at different growth stages.

The objective of this study was to determine how much improvement red edge-based vegetation indices (VIs) obtained with the RapidSCAN sensor would achieve for estimating rice nitrogen (N) nutrition index (NNI) at stem elongation stage (SE) as compared with commonly used normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and ratio vegetation index (RVI) in Northeast China. Sixteen plot experiments and seven on-farm experiments were conducted from 2014 to 2016 in Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. The results indicated that the performance of red edge-based VIs for estimation of rice NNI was better than NDVI and RVI. N sufficiency index calculated with RapidSCAN VIs (NSI_VIs) (R2=0.43–0.59) were more stable and more strongly related to NNI than the corresponding VIs (R2=0.12–0.38).