**5. Conclusions**

This study is a step towards improving agricultural practices such as variable rate irrigation, fertilizer and herbicide application, yield prediction, disease monitoring, and many others. This achievement is made possible because of the newly-derived VIs and models that can estimate LAI throughout the season without saturation. As a result, agricultural practices informed through remote sensing can potentially improve agricultural production.

This study found that Sentinel-2 Band-8A (Narrow NIR) is more accurate for LAI estimation than Band-8 (NIR). A very important achievement of the study is that the Band-5 (Red edge-1) showed a low correlation with LAI. Band 9 (Water vapour) showed a very high correlation with LAI alongside the red-edge bands 6 and 7 and NIR bands. Band-9 was demonstrated to be effective for LAI estimation when incorporated into new VIs suggested here for the first time, WEVI and WNEVI. Importantly, Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12 were saturated at LAI ≈ 3 and were practically not responsive to a further increase in LAI around LAI ≈ 6. Bands 6, 7, 8, 8A, 9 did not saturate at high LAI. ReNDVI, WEVI, and WNEVI were found to be the best performing VIs for LAI estimation of all three crops tested in this study.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualisation G.K., O.R.; Methodology, Software, Investigation, G.K.; Writing—original draft preparation, review and editing, Visualisation, G.K., O.R.; Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, O.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** The field measurements were funded by the Chief Scientist of the Ministry of Agriculture, Israel, under gran<sup>t</sup> 20-21-0006 and by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Israel, under gran<sup>t</sup> numbers 3-14559, 3-15605.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Sentinel-2 data were obtained from the ESA Copernicus Open Access Hub website (https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home, accessed on 26 April 2021).

**Acknowledgments:** We thank Bar Avni-Naor, Nitai Heymann, Lior Fine, Victor Lukyanov, and Nitzan Malachy for their contribution to data processing and fieldwork. We also thank all the growers.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.




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