From Sensing to Intervention: A Critical Review of Agricultural Drones for Precision Agriculture, Data-Driven Decision Making, and Sustainable Intensification

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in precision agronomy to support high-resolution monitoring and management of crops; however, the extent to which UAV-derived data can be translated into reliable, scalable, and decision-ready applications remains inconsistent. This review addresses this gap by critically synthesising the recent literature with a specific focus on the end-to-end data pipeline, from acquisition planning and pre-processing to data fusion, analytics readiness, and operational decision support. A systematic analysis of peer-reviewed studies published over the last five years was conducted to evaluate core agronomic applications, including crop health monitoring, precision irrigation, soil and field variability assessment, spraying, and yield prediction, with particular attention to indicators used, validation strategies, and reported agronomic outcomes. The findings indicate that monitoring and diagnostic applications are the most mature and consistently validated, whereas interventional uses and absolute yield prediction remain strongly context-dependent and constrained by operational, methodological, and regulatory factors. Across applications, pipeline robustness, uncertainty management, and reproducibility emerge as more critical determinants of agronomic value than sensor resolution alone. The review further identifies key barriers to scaling, including technical limitations, skills requirements, data integration challenges, and regulatory constraints, and outlines an innovation roadmap distinguishing currently deployable solutions from emerging developments over the next three to five years. Overall, this work provides a decision-oriented framework to support more transparent, validated, and sustainable integration of UAV technologies into modern agricultural systems.