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Development and evaluation of an automatic software for management zone delineation

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Abstract

The lack of availability of user-friendly and automatic software for management zone delineation is limiting the adoption of site-specific management practices. Several procedures for management zone delineation have been proposed, but they commonly require the use of different software, or advanced GIS and statistical skills of users, which limit their adoption. This study proposes a user-friendly and automatic software that would integrate all steps in order to delineate management zones and make prescription files. The software includes importation of different input data layers, re-projection and resizing data in a common grid size. An integrative index was proposed for the selection of the optimal number of zones after clustering analysis. Users are guided by graphical windows showing intermediate results. Also, additional automatic post-processing techniques to improve size, shape and fragmentation of delineated zones are available. The final step allows generation of the ESRI Shapefile required to make variable rate prescriptions by zone with minimal user intervention. The performance of the approach was evaluated for management zone delineation using single and multiple layers of data by comparing with Management Zone Analyst software, and the improvement of the approach in the selection of the optimal number of zones and reducing zone-fragmentation was shown. The software design includes a simple graphical user interface and requires minimal user intervention in order to assist the end-user. The main contribution of this work was the successful development of this automatic user-friendly solution that includes all the necessary steps for management zone delineation and prescription file generation.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica and Universidad Nacional del Litoral (with PACT 2011 #58, CAI+D 2011 #58-511) and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) in Argentina, for their support; and to Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria, Estación Experimental Paraná (INTA) (with Project PNAIyAV 1130023) in Argentina, for their support and experimental data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional (sinc(i)), UNL-CONICET, Santa Fe, Argentina

    Enrique M. Albornoz, Romina Galarza, Nicolás Mastaglia & César E. Martínez

  2. Grupo Recursos Naturales y Factores Abióticos, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Paraná, Oro Verde, Entre Ríos, Argentina

    Alejandra C. Kemerer & Ricardo Melchiori

  3. Cátedras de SIG y Climatología Agrícola, Facultad de Ciencias Agropecuarias, Univ. Nacional de Entre Ríos, Oro Verde, Entre Ríos, Argentina

    Alejandra C. Kemerer

  4. Laboratorio de Cibernética, Facultad de Ingeniería, Univ. Nacional de Entre Ríos, Oro Verde, Entre Ríos, Argentina

    César E. Martínez

Authors
  1. Enrique M. Albornoz
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  2. Alejandra C. Kemerer
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  3. Romina Galarza
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  4. Nicolás Mastaglia
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  5. Ricardo Melchiori
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  6. César E. Martínez
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Correspondence to Alejandra C. Kemerer.

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Albornoz, E.M., Kemerer, A.C., Galarza, R. et al. Development and evaluation of an automatic software for management zone delineation. Precision Agric 19, 463–476 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-017-9530-9

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