Establishing management zones using soil electrical conductivity and other soil properties by the fuzzy clustering technique

Abstract

The design of site-specific management zones that can successfully define uniform regions of soil fertility attributes that are of importance to crop growth is one of the most challenging steps in precision agriculture. One important method of so proceeding is based solely on crop yield stability using information from yield maps; however, it is possible to accomplish this using soil information. In this study the soil was sampled for electrical conductivity and eleven other soil properties, aiming to define uniform site-specific management zones in relation to these variables. Principal component analysis was used to group variables and fuzzy logic classification was used for clustering the transformed variables. The importance of electrical conductivity in this process was evaluated based on its correlation with soil fertility and physical attributes. The results confirmed the utility of electrical conductivity in the definition of management zones and the feasibility of the proposed method.