Agronomic Big Data Analytics for improved crop management

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Agricultural systems are complex, and must be managed if we are to achieve food security andmaintain environmental quality. The management of complex systems in industry and commerce isbeing improved by the collection, processing and analysis of "big data" sets. For some years farmershave had the potential to collect big data sets on their crops and soils using GPS-driven monitors onthe combine or tractor, data from satellite-borne sensors and the direct sampling and analysis of soils.This raises the question of whether agriculture can enter the big data era in order to solvemanagement problems more quickly and robustly than through the conventional approach of fieldtrials at a limited number of experimental sites. We contend that this is possible, but only by usingmethods to analyse the data that are biologically meaningful rather than by blindly mining data forcorrelations. This is a feasibility study to test two tailored big-data analytical methods on a large data