DEVELOPMENT OF A COST-OPTIMISED SOIL SAMPLING METHOD TO SUPPORT PRECISION FARMING

Fuente: Wipo "precision farming"
A soil sampling method to support precision farming comprises the steps of: Building a terrain model, done by remote sensing, by collecting logged data to RTK navigation machines, or from publicly available sources; Producing derived data of a topography model, such as slope angle, topographic wetness index, channel network, relative slope position, elevation; Analyse the data by way of principal component analysis and then transform the data into principal components to reduce dimensionality and decorrelation between variables; Randomly sample the database fifty times using the Latin Hypercube method to select the sampling points, which are clustered and developing the final sampling design in form of a table; Examining the sample points, and then using the random forest algorithm to extend the sample points to the entire table. Thus, a sampling algorithm based on a terrain model and derived data with the right representativeness by taking the smallest sample size is provided.