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Simplified Management Zones from Analyses and Mapping of Multiple Years of Spatially Distributed Harvest Data

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The National Science Foundation's Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP), and HBCU Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) have paved the way for undergraduate research involvement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines at University of Maryland Eastern Shore(UMES) among the underrepresented minority students. Ongoing multidisciplinary experiential learning and research efforts titled (i) AIRSPACES : Aerial Imaging and Remote Sensing for Precision Agriculture and Environmental Stewardship funded by the Maryland Space Grant Consortium and (ii) Environmentally Conscious Precision Agriculture (ECPA) : A Platform for Active Learning and Community Engagement funded by the United States Department of Agriculture provide synergistic platforms for undergraduate involvement that promotes both the LSAMP and HBCU-UP objectives, while enhancing the proposed outcomes for the AIRSPACES and ECPA projects. The principal author who serves as the principal investigator for the AIRSPACES and ECPA projects at UMES mentored one of the undergraduate students in the LSAMP program in the spring and summer of 2008. The student was partially supported by the HBCU-UP program. The undergraduate student who is also the co-author of this paper got an opportunity to work with the NASA and the USDA collaborators, UMES farm personnel, graduate students, and a team of interdisciplinary UMES faculty collaborators, while performing analyses of geo-referenced harvest data collected over one of the UMES agricultural fields since the inception of the project in 2004. At early stages of the ECPA project, the UMES combine was retrofitted with a yield monitor and GPS unit, and spatial distribution of harvest data have been recorded for the field for all subsequent harvests. The student got an opportunity to learn spatial mapping software such as “ARCGIS” and “SMS Advanced”, while getting exposed to various aspects of the growing field of “precision agriculture”. Based on the analyses of several years of yield data, a simplified “management zone” framework for the field has been obtained. This framework will be refined and utilized for “variable rate seeding” effort in the future for improving the profitability of the field.

1.0 Introduction The benefits of implementing undergraduate research for faculty, students, institution, and the nation as a whole particularly in the STEM disciplines are well documented [1]. The involvement in experiential learning and research by students not only improves content knowledge, and

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Nagchaudhuri, A., & Morris, A., & Mitra, M., & Henry, X. (2009, June), Simplified Management Zones From Analyses And Mapping Of Multiple Years Of Spatially Distributed Harvest Data Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--4745