Site-Season effects on crop productivity

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Yield mapping in combinable crops has made identifying spatial variation in yield across fields and farms easier. Mapped soil information, (typical profile, sub-soil properties, mineralogy water-holding capacity, trafficability etc.) is available, at 1:250,000 scale, which is not sufficiently detailed to allow in-field variation to be considered effectively. Crop yields also vary markedly in time, with variation in weather (Wreford and Adger, 2010), pest and disease pressure (Madgwick et al., 2011), and seasonal management impacts including cultivations, rotations and fertiliser and pesticide use. Analysing and quantifying relationships between heterogeneous soil conditions and crop growth and yield has often been constrained by a lack of data due to high costs and time demands associated with the sampling (Heil and Schmidhalter, 2012). In the limited number of studies where both temporal and spatial variation are investigated, the patterns often interact i.e. high yielding areas one year might be low yielding the next (Blackmore et al., 2003).