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Plant Science Today (PST)

Research Articles

Vol. 13 No. sp1 (2026): Recent Advances in Agriculture

Optimization and validation of leaf color chart, SPAD meter and GreenSeeker thresholds for precise nitrogen management in wheat cv. Karan Vandana

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14719/pst.13123
Submitted
8 December 2025
Published
30-01-2026

Abstract

Nitrogen inefficiency in cereal cropping systems leads to suboptimal yields, environmental pollution and reduced fertilizer recovery rates. Non-destructive tools, including the leaf color chart (LCC), Soil plant analysis development meter (SPAD) and GreenSeeker, enable real-time assessment of canopy nitrogen status and site-specific fertilizer recommendations. Therefore, field experiments were conducted at Research farm of Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, Jammu during rabi season 2023–24 and 2024–25 with 14 treatments on sandy clay loam soil in randomized block design (RBD) and 3 replications. The results revealed that significantly higher growth, yield attributes, yield and N uptake were found with the application of LCC ≤ 5 at 20 kg N ha-1 (T6) which was statistically at par with LCC ≤ 4 at 20 kg N ha-1 (T4), GreenSeeker-directed N application ≤ 0.8 normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) at 20 kg N ha-1 (T14) and sufficiency index-based N application ≤ 95 % at 20 kg N ha-1 (T10) during both the years. Linear regression analysis conducted over 2 years demonstrated that the LCC value had a significant positive correlation with grain yield (GY) at 5 % significance level with an average correlation coefficient of 0.92.

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